NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE T hink for a moment, if you would, about that wonderful instant in which you realized you could do something you once thought impossible. That moment of awe that drives away the previous moment’s fear or doubt, opening your mind to endless possibilities. Perhaps it was the moment you finished that marathon. Or maybe it was when you finally buttered that landing (a goal for those, like me, working on their piloting skills). For Betsy, her moment comes when Uncle Henry, having met her at the train station, hands her the wagon reins and tells her to drive home while he works on a math problem.

Drive a team of horses? How difficult could it be to pull right when you want them to go right and pull left to go left? If you’re Betsy, “difficult” is the wrong word. “Impossible” and “unthinkable” would be more appropriate.

When we first meet Betsy, she goes by “Elizabeth Ann,” and a weaker, mousier character you never did see. An orphan, Elizabeth Ann was adopted as a baby by her Aunt Harriet and Cousin Frances, who proceed to coddle her until the little girl cannot do a thing for herself. Every concept is overexplained to her, she never dresses or undresses herself, she is walked to school and home each day, and she is encouraged to share every feeling she has.

Thin and pale, Elizabeth Ann believes she has a delicate constitution and that she must keep up appearances by eating very little. She sleeps poorly and tells all her bad dreams to Frances, who writes them down and tries to discover just what kind of child Elizabeth Ann is. Above all other impressions foisted upon our little girl, however, is that the Putney cousins — who live in Vermont and from whom Aunt Harriet and Cousin Frances believe they’ve rescued her — are dreadful people. They make children do chores.

Then, without warning, Elizabeth Ann must leave her midwestern city and travel alone to Vermont to live — oh horror — with those terrible Putneys. What she learns about them and about herself after arriving at their farm, though, surprises her and delights readers.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1879–1958) isn’t a well-known author today, except perhaps through Understood Betsy, published in 1916. In her day, she was a force to be reckoned with. Born in Kansas, this daughter of an artist and a college professor had traveled to Paris by age eleven, went on to earn several degrees, and could speak five languages. Living in Paris with her husband and two children during World War I, “Dorothy worked in rehabilitating war-blinded French soldiers,” Eden Ross Lipson explains in her afterword to the 1999 edition. “She founded a press to print books in Braille, and established convalescent homes for refugee Parisian children.” She was also an early, eager promoter of the Montessori Method of teaching, which she observed first-hand during a trip to Italy. Her enthusiasm spilled over into books explicitly detailing the method and can be seen clearly (but not didactically) in the pages of Understood Betsy.

Young readers are apt to laugh sympathetically at the confusion that Betsy (as she is called by the Putneys) experiences in her new home. School, of course, is terrifying at first. Accustomed to being a third-grader in her former school, she now finds herself in a one-room schoolhouse with a status that’s far from clear:

Elizabeth Ann fell back on the bench with her mouth open. She felt really dizzy. What crazy things the teacher said! She felt as though she was being pulled limb from limb.

“What’s the matter?” asked the teacher, seeing her bewildered face.

“Why—why,” said Elizabeth Ann, “I don’t know what I am at all. If I’m in second-grade arithmetic and seventh-grade reading and third-grade spelling, what grade am I?”

The teacher laughed. “You aren’t any grade at all, no matter where you are in school. You’re just yourself, aren’t you? What difference does it make what grade you’re in? And what’s the use of your reading little baby things too easy for you just because you don’t know your multiplication table?” 

This isn’t the only element of her new Vermont life that confuses Betsy. But it also elates her, just as that moment driving the wagon home from the station did, when she suddenly had to figure out something for herself. This new experience is a sensation, and even those supposedly horrible Putneys — Uncle Henry, Aunt Abigail, and Cousin Ann — defy her expectations. Their simple, no-nonsense, brusquely kind ways present her with an entirely novel manner of thinking and living, and over the story’s course, we see her grow from a wispy, emotional child to a strong, capable one.

The true depths of Betsy’s education may have been lost on my younger self, but I was enamored with the descriptions of butter-making, tiny kittens, old wooden dolls, and fresh donuts. Life on a farm isn’t romanticized, but it is charmingly portrayed. It’s a place of hard work, delicious food, steady wisdom, and amusing realizations:

Then Aunt Abigail let her run the curiously shaped wooden butter-worker back and forth over the butter, squeezing out the water, and then pile it up again with her wooden paddle into a mound of gold. She weighed out the salt needed on the scales, and was very much surprised to find that there really is such a thing as an ounce. She had never met it before outside the pages of her arithmetic book and she didn’t know it lived anywhere else. 

Maria Montessori’s philosophy of learning may be on display in this book, but it is an insightful character study, too. We cheer Betsy on as she learns to stand on her own two feet. We feel her comfort in Aunt Abigail’s presence, her joy in reading aloud to Uncle Henry, and her pride in gaining Cousin Ann’s approval. Fisher’s straightforward, descriptive prose captures the mood and lighting of each scene. It shows us Aunt Harriet’s stiff city parlor, the sunlight streaming though the kitchen in Vermont, and the joyful mêlée of a country recess. And as Lipson points out, “in the opening chapters, the author . . . talks right to you — she’s the narrator, setting the scene. But that’s just to get the story going. As if by magic, once Elizabeth’s transformation begins, that grown-up voice disappears and the story seems to tell itself, right to the very last special word.”

Discoveries can be as modest as sewing a neat buttonhole or cooking a pot of applesauce on your own. These are the moments that shape our understanding of the world and contribute to our wonder at it. For all readers, this book captures that flurry of joy that comes with small discoveries.