Pushed to thinking for herself, she snags a pick-up job washing dishes at a food booth, and earns enough money for their train fare home. In another episode, Betsy and a smaller child are accidentally left behind at a county fair, and Besty suddenly finds herself in the role of the responsible one. Betsy is shocked at this casual dismissal of the “right” way to do things in favor of what makes sense.

The theme of the story is not, like so many girls’ books of the era, that Betsy needs to knuckle under to someone else’s value system, but that she needs to use her own brain to figure out what ought to be done, and find the backbone to do it.Īt the tiny local school, children are not lock-stepped into a particular grade, but instead are given work appropriate to their ability. Canfield went to Rome and brought back Maria Montessori’s teaching methods to the U.S., and these ideas strongly influence Understood Betsy. She was a radical for her time, championing sexual and racial equality, humanitarian work during the war, educational reform, and life-long learning. She did doctoral work in Paris and earned her PhD at Columbia University, spoke five languages, and was noted in literary circles. But though superficially similar, the underlying world-view is quite different.Ĭanfield was born in 1879 to an artist/writer mother and a history professor father. This could easily be mistaken for a knock-off of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903) or Anne of Green Gables (1908), in which a young girl goes to live with stern rural elders and learns valuable lessons of simple living and hard work. The relatives expect her to be capable and self-reliant, and little by little she proves them right. City-bred Elizabeth Ann (later styled “Besty”) lives with her nervous, overprotective aunts, until circumstances require her to go live with Vermont relatives.

Understood betsy