Sarah Chauncey Woolsey, die unter dem Pseudonym Susan Coolidge schrieb, war eine amerikanische Autorin, die für ihre klassischen Kindergeschichten bekannt ist. Ihr berühmtestes Werk, das von ihrem eigenen familiären Umfeld inspiriert wurde, bietet einen realistischen Einblick in das Familienleben und die Erziehung im 19. Jahrhundert. Woolsey trug auch zur literarischen Überlieferung bei, indem sie die Korrespondenz und Tagebücher anderer Schriftstellerinnen herausgab und so Einblicke in deren Leben und Schaffen ermöglichte.
Three essential stories for girlhood reading, retold for young readers and collected in one lovely package In Heidi , a little orphan girl is forced to live with her grumpy grandfather in a lonely hut in the Alps, and eventually comes to love her mountain life. Katie intends to be beautiful and good one day—so when an accident happens, Katie must be brave and hold on to her dreams, in What Katie Did . Black Beauty is the story of a noble horse who is cruelly mistreated as he searches to find a new and loving home.
Letter-writing was something of an addiction for young women of Jane Austen's time and social position, and Austen's letters have a freedom and familiarity that only intimate writing can convey. Wiser than her critics, who were disappointed that her correspondence dwelt on gossip and the minutiae of everyday living, Austen understood the importance of 'Little Matters', of the emotional and material details of individual lives shared with friends and family through the medium of the letter. Ironic, acerbic, always entertaining, Jane Austen's letters are a fascinating record not only of her own day-to-day existence, but of the pleasures and frustrations experienced by women of her social class which are so central to her novels. Vivien Jones's selection includes very nearly two-thirds of Austen's surviving correspondence, and her lively introduction and notes set the novelist's most private writings in their wider cultural context.
The September sun was glinting cheerfully into a pretty bedroom furnished with blue. It danced on the glossy hair and bright eyes of two girls, who sat together hemming ruffles for a white muslin dress. The half-finished skirt of the dress lay on the bed; and as each crisp ruffle was completed, the girls added it to the snowy heap, which looked like a drift of transparent clouds or a pile of foamy white-of-egg beaten stiff enough to stand alone. These girls were Clover and Elsie Carr, and it was Clover's first evening dress for which they were hemming ruffles. It was nearly two years since a certain visit made by Johnnie to Inches Mills, of which some of you have read in "Nine Little Goslings;" and more than three since Clover and Katy had returned home from the boarding-school at Hillsover. Clover was now eighteen. She was a very small Clover still, but it would have been hard to find anywhere a prettier little maiden than she had grown to be. Her skin was so exquisitely fair that her arms and wrists and shoulders, which were round and dimpled like a baby's, seemed cut out of daisies or white rose leaves. Her thick, brown hair waved and coiled gracefully about her head. Her smile was peculiarly sweet; and the eyes, always Clover's chief beauty, had still that pathetic look which made them irresistible to tender-hearted people.
Dr Carr's mind is firmly made up. Katy and her little sister Clover are to spend a whole year away at boarding school. A strange place, far from home, but on arrival the girls have an inkling that it might turn out to be rather different from their expectations. One thing is for sure, it certainly isn't going to be dull with a girl like Rose Red as an ally.
