The Charming Sally

by Maud Hart Lovelace

The Charming Sally tells a fictionalized story of the Hallam Company, the first theatrical troupe to visit North America.

Genres: Historical Fiction

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1932

About the author

Maud Hart Lovelace was born on April 25, 1892, in Mankato, Minnesota. She was the middle of three children born to Thomas and Stella (Palmer) Hart. Her sister, Kathleen, was three years older, and her other sister, Helen, was six years younger. “That dear family" was the model for the fictional Ray family.

Maud’s birthplace was a small house on a hilly residential street several blocks above Mankato’s center business district. The street, Center Street, dead-ended at one of the town’s many hills. When Maud was a few months old, the Hart family moved two blocks up the street to 333 Center.

Shortly before Maud’s fifth birthday a “large merry Irish family" moved into the house directly across the street. Among its many children was a girl Maud’s age, Frances, nicknamed Bick, who was to be Maud’s best friend and the model for Tacy Kelly.

Tib’s character was based on another playmate, Marjorie (Midge) Gerlach, who lived nearby in a large house designed by her architect father. Maud, Bick, and Midge became lifelong friends. Maud once stated that the three couldn’t have been closer if they’d been sisters.

Reviews

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

While it was her fourth novel, The Charming Sally was my final in completing Maud Hart Lovelace’s oeuvre of published works! The book is titled not after its heroine but for the ship that bookends a company of comedians (actors) from London to the colonies and away again.

As actors in pre-revolutionary America, the eccentric troupe is received with responses ranging from hospitality to hostility. My favorite of their performances is Shakespeare’s Othello. “An old gentleman, the father of Desdemona, who is…foolish enough to dislike the noble Moor, his son-in-law, because his face is not white, forgetting that we all spring from the same root. Such prejudices are very numerous and very wrong. ‘Fathers, beware what sense and love ye lack, ‘Tis crime, not color, makes the being black.’”

Although the book’s title bears a feminine name, the novel is about a Quaker’s undoing. Despite his best efforts, Joel is enraptured by play acting, silk clothing, fist fighting, humming and singing, accessorizing, and the desire to marry a non Quaker and unwed mother Meg and parent her illegitimate daughter.

Both Joel and Meg are faced with a crisis of faith. “What helped people when they reached a point where they could help themselves no longer?...against the starry sky, she saw the spire of Bruton Church…Her question had been answered as though a voice had spoken. God helped them…If the pages of the Book of Life are turned one by one as we learn the lessons written on them, a page was turned just then for Joel…He was surprised to discover that the sonorous rolling sentences were unfolding a story.”

“So strangely do inanimate objects seem to triumph over those powerful frail flames which are human beings.” Just as “The players were losing their battle with the shadows; one by one they yielded up their arms,” so Meg and Joel yield their prejudgments and misconceptions to discover their own charming happily ever after.

[Sally]

I gotta read this one!