Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm

Summary

Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm follows Rebecca Rowena Randall from the age of ten to seventeen. Her widowed mother, Aurelia, is struggling with seven children and a mortgage on Sunnybrook Farm near Temperance, Maine, so Rebecca is sent instead of her capable older sister Hannah to live with her mother's unmarried sisters, Miranda and Jane Sawyer, in the old brick house at Riverboro, where she is to be educated. The novel opens as she rides the stage coach with a pink parasol and a bunch of lilacs, talking so freely with the driver, Jeremiah Cobb, that uncle Jerry and his wife, aunt Sarah, become her lifelong friends. Aunt Miranda, stern, thrifty and disappointed that Hannah did not come, sees in Rebecca the dark looks and impractical ways of her late father, the handsome, unsuccessful Lorenzo de Medici Randall; aunt Jane, quieter, had nursed soldiers in the Civil War after her betrothed, Tom Carter, died of his wounds, and she softens the household. Rebecca goes to the district school under young Miss Dearborn, befriends Emma Jane Perkins and the ragged, cheerful children of the absent ne'er-do-well Abner Simpson, and writes compositions and verses. She wears her new pink gingham to a school exhibition, hears Miranda speak hard words about her father, and runs off to the Cobbs' meaning to go home, but uncle Jerry talks her back. Rebecca and Emma Jane sell soap to win a banquet lamp for the Simpsons; the young Boston businessman Adam Ladd buys three hundred cakes, earns the name Mr. Aladdin, and becomes her friend and patron, and the lamp lights the Simpsons' Thanksgiving. The baby Mira dies at Sunnybrook. Sent to represent the family at a missionary meeting, Rebecca plays the hymn tune on the melodeon and, asked unexpectedly, prays aloud, and the Reverend Amos Burch and his wife, returned from Syria, stay at the brick house. At the Wareham Female Seminary Rebecca finds a mentor in the teacher Emily Maxwell, edits the school paper, and wins Adam Ladd's essay prize, sending the money home to pay mortgage interest, while the aunts secretly lose part of their small income. On her graduation day Miranda has a paralytic stroke; soon afterward Aurelia breaks her knee falling from the haymow, and Rebecca nurses her at Sunnybrook. When Miranda dies, Rebecca learns that she has left her the brick house, and a railway company is buying land at Sunnybrook, freeing the family from want. The novel ends as Rebecca blesses her aunt and the brick house. Houghton Mifflin published it in Boston in 1903; it became a bestseller and was adapted for the stage and screen, most famously in a 1917 film starring Mary Pickford.

Top Lessons

• Living with a hard-tempered elder

  Aunt Miranda scolds, compares Rebecca to her improvident father and rarely praises her, yet she pays for Rebecca's schooling and leaves her the brick house. Wiggin lets Rebecca learn that gratitude can be owed to someone who was hard to live with, and aunt Jane's last words about Miranda put both her faults and her goodness on the table.

• Running away and starting again

  After the scolding over the pink dress Rebecca climbs out her window to go home. Uncle Jerry does not lecture her; he lets her talk, reminds her of her mother's troubles, and tells her she has only come to consult him about running away. The scene teaches the worth of a patient older friend and of returning to begin again.

• Imagination put to work

  Rebecca's quick fancy names a rich stranger Mr. Aladdin, turns a soap-selling chore into an adventure for the Simpsons, and later fills the Wareham school paper. Her gifts are not simply admired; she has to learn grammar, compositions and patience, and she spends her prize money on her family's mortgage.

• Called on to pray

  At the missionary meeting Mr. Burch asks Rebecca, who is not yet a church member, to lead in prayer, and she does so trembling. Afterward she tells aunt Jane how frightening it was. Wiggin treats the moment seriously as a step in a young person's inner life rather than as a performance.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Illness and nursing are part of the background of rural family life rather than the subject of the book. Aunt Jane's backstory records a Civil War gunshot death in a Southern hospital and her months of nursing other soldiers afterward, a common path for Northern women in that war. Late in the novel Miranda is described as paralyzed after a second stroke, though she keeps her speech, and she dies suddenly some months later; the doctor's uncertainty is reported plainly. Aurelia's fall from the haymow, attributed to giddiness, fractures her knee and injures her back, and Rebecca's long weeks of bandaging, rubbing, feeding and bathing her mother give a homely picture of domestic nursing before district nurses reached rural Maine. The death of the baby Mira is told briefly as a turning point in Rebecca's thoughts.

• Chapter III, A Difference in Hearts

  The narrator tells how Jane went south when her betrothed was wounded, held his hand as he died, and nursed other soldiers for months.

• Chapter XVII, Gray Days and Gold

  The death of Rebecca's baby sister Mira and Rebecca's visit home to the little grave under the willow.

• Chapters XXVIII–XXIX

  Miranda's paralytic stroke; Aurelia's fractured knee and Rebecca's months of nursing her at Sunnybrook.