Indeed, throughout the series, which starts when Maud (alias Betsy) is 5 years old, the deceptively simple plots feature parents who are positive and delightedly open to their children’s initiative and creativity. “Can anyone possibly appreciate the impact that made on a child like me, wanting it too, but seeing all around me on the bookshelves the names of men-and seeing all around me in my home the domesticated ways of women?” “Do you realize that not once, in any of the books, does any individual, male or female, suggest to Betsy that she cannot, as she so hopes to do, become a writer? Quindlen’s talk, titled “Betsy Ray, Feminist Icon,” explained her fondness for the fictional heroine and her family by asking: “They are Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and Maud Hart Lovelace.” “There are three authors whose body of work I have reread more than once in my adult life,” Quindlen said at a meeting of the Betsy-Tacy Society in St. HarperCollins is reissuing the entire series in paperback due to what editors call “moderate public demand.” The books have also inspired a national newsletter with 1,000 subscribers, a national Betsy-Tacy Society, a fund-raising effort to maintain the homes in Mankato where Betsy’s and Tacy’s real-life counterparts lived, a Betsy-Tacy chat line on the Internet and a plethora of commercial Betsy-Tacy-styled items (from lithographs and pewter figurines to cookbooks). How odd, then, that the Betsy-Tacy books have become a kind of cult treasure among thousands who have read them, including such disparate sorts as singer / actress Bette Midler and Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen. Lovelace earned enough from her books to support an easy, if modest, lifestyle with her husband in their later years-but she never became really rich or famous.
Although Betsy-Tacy (as aficionados call the series) has never been totally out of print since the first book was published in 1940, neither has it become a household name.
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