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Barnabetta
This book was digitized and reprinted from the collections of the University of California Libraries. It was produced from digital images created through the libraries’ mass digitization efforts. The digital images were cleaned and prepared for printing through automated processes. Despite the cleaning process, occasional flaws may still be present that were part of the original work itself, or introduced during digitization. This book and hundreds of thousands of others can be found online in the HathiTrust Digital Library at www.hathitrust.org.
360 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 1914
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 15, 2022
3.5
Helen R. Martin was a once popular novelist who in the early 20th century chronicled the lives of Pennsylvania Dutch people, particularly Mennonites. The book at hand, published in 1915, is something of a Cinderella story. Barnabetta Dreary, the only girl in her motherless family (her mother's last "pretty thought" before expiring was that her newborn daughter should be given a name combining those of her parents, Barnaby and Etta) is treated like a slave by her miserly father and two brutish older brothers, doing all the housekeeping, washing, hauling coal etc, with never a moment's rest or a chance to have any pleasant social interaction. She is growing "dumm," in the local vernacular, with overwork and no mental stimulation. Her salvation comes in the unlikely form of the sudden arrival of a step-mother, a "cultured" well-off spinster from Reading who the father marries on the assumption that he'll take complete control of her finances. "Juliet," whose real name is Susan, is a remarkable character. Through a combination of a non-stop flow of flowery "high-toned" language and a shrewdness that led her to instruct her lawyer before her marriage, to ignore all financial directives from her future husband, Juliet manages to reorganize the grim household completely along her own lines. Hired help releases Barnabetta from the more exhausting of her chores, while reading, music lessons, drives in a hired buggy, shopping excursions and picture shows give color to her life.
Juliet dominates the first half of the book; the second half is mostly told from the point of view of the president of "Stevens College," where Barnabetta is sent by her beloved "Mama" to get an education, first in the attached preparatory school, and then as an undergraduate. On being told that Stevens is a venerable women's college "in Southeastern Pennsylvania" I, as an aficionado of vintage college girl fiction, was wondering, could it be a fictional Bryn Mawr? But no, the newly installed, conspicuously single and highly refined president from a family of Boston Brahmins scorns the idea of his niece attending lowly Stevens. Coming from a "civilized" family, she attends Bryn Mawr. President Barrett gets to know awkward countrified Barnabetta her first year when she is in his Shakespeare class, and follows her progress in the ensuing years with a growing interest. Meanwhile it seems he's met his clear match in the ethereally beautiful Miss Theodora Jordan, another ultra-refined (and snobbish) Boston transplant who keeps house for her much older brother, a wealthy judge with surprising socialist leanings. What will become of Barnabetta when she graduates?
After waffling for a time on the question, I've decided not to put this book on my "college girls" shelf; the label feels wrong when almost nothing in the story tells of Barnabetta's college experiences from her own point of view.
Although the novel felt frothy, and the writing was occasionally overblown and clumsy (when elegant Miss Jordan makes an appearance at a college dance, we're told "a large red rose heaved and fell at her breast"), I did enjoy this book quite a bit. The Pennsylvania Dutch setting was interesting, I was amused by some of the turns of the plot, and was very charmed by the step-mother Juliet, a woman full of intellectual and romantic pretentions, and execrable tastes which horrify the "refined" characters when they encounter her. She is none the less the real heroine -- Barnabetta's life is transformed by the material comforts her step-mother provides, but even more transformed by her love. "Barnabetta" was adapted into a successful play with a title that gives Juliet top billing: "Erstwhile Susan."
I should note that this novel is "of its time" as apologists like to say, and contains an unfortunate racial slur.
Helen R. Martin was a once popular novelist who in the early 20th century chronicled the lives of Pennsylvania Dutch people, particularly Mennonites. The book at hand, published in 1915, is something of a Cinderella story. Barnabetta Dreary, the only girl in her motherless family (her mother's last "pretty thought" before expiring was that her newborn daughter should be given a name combining those of her parents, Barnaby and Etta) is treated like a slave by her miserly father and two brutish older brothers, doing all the housekeeping, washing, hauling coal etc, with never a moment's rest or a chance to have any pleasant social interaction. She is growing "dumm," in the local vernacular, with overwork and no mental stimulation. Her salvation comes in the unlikely form of the sudden arrival of a step-mother, a "cultured" well-off spinster from Reading who the father marries on the assumption that he'll take complete control of her finances. "Juliet," whose real name is Susan, is a remarkable character. Through a combination of a non-stop flow of flowery "high-toned" language and a shrewdness that led her to instruct her lawyer before her marriage, to ignore all financial directives from her future husband, Juliet manages to reorganize the grim household completely along her own lines. Hired help releases Barnabetta from the more exhausting of her chores, while reading, music lessons, drives in a hired buggy, shopping excursions and picture shows give color to her life.
Juliet dominates the first half of the book; the second half is mostly told from the point of view of the president of "Stevens College," where Barnabetta is sent by her beloved "Mama" to get an education, first in the attached preparatory school, and then as an undergraduate. On being told that Stevens is a venerable women's college "in Southeastern Pennsylvania" I, as an aficionado of vintage college girl fiction, was wondering, could it be a fictional Bryn Mawr? But no, the newly installed, conspicuously single and highly refined president from a family of Boston Brahmins scorns the idea of his niece attending lowly Stevens. Coming from a "civilized" family, she attends Bryn Mawr. President Barrett gets to know awkward countrified Barnabetta her first year when she is in his Shakespeare class, and follows her progress in the ensuing years with a growing interest. Meanwhile it seems he's met his clear match in the ethereally beautiful Miss Theodora Jordan, another ultra-refined (and snobbish) Boston transplant who keeps house for her much older brother, a wealthy judge with surprising socialist leanings. What will become of Barnabetta when she graduates?
After waffling for a time on the question, I've decided not to put this book on my "college girls" shelf; the label feels wrong when almost nothing in the story tells of Barnabetta's college experiences from her own point of view.
Although the novel felt frothy, and the writing was occasionally overblown and clumsy (when elegant Miss Jordan makes an appearance at a college dance, we're told "a large red rose heaved and fell at her breast"), I did enjoy this book quite a bit. The Pennsylvania Dutch setting was interesting, I was amused by some of the turns of the plot, and was very charmed by the step-mother Juliet, a woman full of intellectual and romantic pretentions, and execrable tastes which horrify the "refined" characters when they encounter her. She is none the less the real heroine -- Barnabetta's life is transformed by the material comforts her step-mother provides, but even more transformed by her love. "Barnabetta" was adapted into a successful play with a title that gives Juliet top billing: "Erstwhile Susan."
I should note that this novel is "of its time" as apologists like to say, and contains an unfortunate racial slur.
April 28, 2015
Interesting "coming of age" in Pennsylvania Dutch country in 1915, with a socialist-feminist bent!
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews