Understood Betsy

Summary

Understood Betsy follows nine-year-old Elizabeth Ann, an orphan raised in a medium-sized Midwestern city by her Great-aunt Harriet and Aunt Frances, a piano teacher who has studied child-rearing books and correspondence courses and is determined that her niece shall be thoroughly understood. Elizabeth Ann is thin, pale and frightened of dogs, thunder and examinations, and Aunt Frances shares and rehearses every fear with her. When the doctor called to examine the child discovers instead that Aunt Harriet's cough is serious and orders her to a warm climate, Aunt Frances goes with her mother. A scarlet-fever quarantine at the Lathrop cousins' house sends Elizabeth Ann instead to the dreaded Putney cousins on their Vermont farm near Hillsboro. Great-uncle Henry hands her the reins on the drive from the station; Aunt Abigail gives her a kitten, which she names Eleanor; Cousin Ann, brisk and black-eyed, calls her Betsy and expects her to wash her own dishes and walk to school alone. At the one-room district school the teacher, Miss Benton, puts her in seventh-grade reading, second-grade arithmetic and third-grade spelling, and asks her to help six-year-old Molly with reading. Betsy learns to make butter and apple sauce, reads Scott's The Lady of the Lake aloud to Uncle Henry, and discovers that the old desk she sits at carries the initials of Uncle Henry and his father. During maple-sugaring she fails an examination before the Superintendent, but that same evening, when Molly falls into the Wolf Pit, she asks herself what Cousin Ann would do and lowers a dead pine branch as a ladder. The Putneys take Molly in while her mother is in hospital. Betsy and the schoolgirls sew clothes for 'Lias Brewster, a neglected first-grader whose stepfather drinks, hoping Mr. Pond the cattle-buyer will adopt him; Cousin Ann asks why they need his thanks, and they leave the bundle on his doorstep at night. The stepfather sells the clothes for whiskey, Ralph scrubs 'Lias clean in the river, and Mr. Pond, seeing the boy weeping in the woodshed on Decoration Day, carries him off to live with him. On her tenth birthday the girls are stranded at the Woodford fair, and Betsy earns the train fare by washing dishes and tending a doughnut booth. In October Aunt Frances arrives, engaged to Mr. Plimpton, and in a careful conversation in the surrey each discovers that the other would be glad for Betsy to stay at Putney Farm. The book appeared as a magazine serial in 1916 and was published by Henry Holt in 1917 with illustrations by Ada C. Williamson.

Top Lessons

• Doing things for yourself

  Elizabeth Ann has always had someone think for her, so her first discovery on the wagon seat, that the horses go where you pull them, is the first whole thought she has ever had. At Putney Farm she learns by doing: driving, churning, cooking, finding her way to school. The book shows that confidence grows from real work, not from reassurance.

• Learning is not the same as passing grades

  Miss Benton puts Betsy in seventh-grade reading and second-grade arithmetic, and tells her she is not any grade at all but just herself. Later Betsy fails an examination and then, the same evening, solves a real problem at the Wolf Pit. The story teaches that school is for learning to use your mind, not only for moving up grades.

• Giving without wanting thanks

  The schoolgirls enjoy imagining how grateful 'Lias will be for their sewing. Cousin Ann's quiet question shows them they were working for praise. After they see 'Lias asleep alone over a crust of bread, they leave the clothes on his step without a name, and Betsy prays for him for the first time in earnest.

• Kindness that protects another's feelings

  When Aunt Frances writes that she is coming to take Betsy away, Betsy decides above all not to hurt her. In the surrey each is afraid of hurting the other, and only careful honesty lets them both say what they want. Betsy ends by wishing she could always take care of Aunt Frances, who once took care of her.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The novel is, among other things, a lay portrait of childhood anxiety and its remedy as an educational reformer of the 1910s understood it. Elizabeth Ann's fears of dogs, thunder, illness and examinations are shown as learned from a loving but anxious guardian: Aunt Frances rehearses her own examination symptoms with the child, asks her to recount nightmares every night, and writes them down to interpret from a thick book full of hard words, an allusion to the vogue for dream analysis and child-study manuals. The family doctor finds the child sound and implies, without saying it, that the household is the trouble; his attention turns instead to Aunt Harriet's cough and a sore spot on her lungs, for which he orders a warm climate, a course that fits the period's management of suspected pulmonary tuberculosis, though the book never names the disease. At the farm the cure is plain: hearty food, sleep, outdoor work, responsibility for a smaller child, and grown-ups who decline to dwell on her feelings. A modern reader may see something like graded exposure and the withdrawal of reassurance, but that is an interpretive reading, not the author's vocabulary. Other details belong to the social history of medicine: a scarlet-fever quarantine, Molly's mother taken to hospital, 'Lias Brewster's hunger and neglect under a stepfather who drinks, and Aunt Abigail's faint, revived with an ammonia bottle.

• Chapter I, Aunt Harriet Has a Cough

  Aunt Frances's nightly dream interviews, her worry over the child's nerves and appetite, the doctor's verdict that the child is sound, and his alarm at Aunt Harriet's cough.

• Chapter I, Aunt Harriet Has a Cough

  Old Mrs. Lathrop shouts from a window that the cook has scarlet fever and the house is quarantined.

• Chapter VII, Elizabeth Ann Fails in an Examination

  The narrator lists the examination symptoms Betsy learned from Aunt Frances, and Cousin Ann's refusal to rehearse them.

• Chapters VIII-IX

  'Lias Brewster's hunger and neglect, and his stepfather's selling the new clothes for whiskey.