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 an American writer best known for the beloved Betsy-Tacy series, which has remained a cornerstone of American children’s literature for generations. Born and raised in Mankato, Minnesota, she began writing at an early age and showed literary promise while still in high school. She attended the University of Minnesota, where she worked for the Minnesota Daily, and sold her first short story while recuperating in California, marking the start of her professional career. Lovelace initially wrote historical novels for adults, including The Black Angels and the successful Early Candlelight, before turning to children’s fiction inspired by stories she told her daughter. Beginning in the late 1930s, she created the Betsy-Tacy books, drawing heavily on her own childhood and friendships. Set largely in the fictional town of Deep Valley, the series follows its heroine from early childhood into adulthood, with the books gradually increasing in complexity alongside their readers. Lovelace also wrote several related Deep Valley novels featuring the same community. Her work was praised for its warmth, authenticity, and vivid sense of place, securing her lasting influence in American literary culture.

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!