In Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, a lively and creative 10-year-old girl is sent to her maiden aunts to receive a good education, but chafes under the restrictive yoke of her elder aunt. As Rebecca learns to channel her energies into positive action, she remains unquenched by her dour aunt and lends joy to both the younger aunt, but also the elderly Cobbs and her best friend, Emma Jane Perkins. The vocabulary in the story may be a bit high for younger readers as REBECCA was not actually written as a children's story; it was the best seller of the year 1904. Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm is much-loved for the same reason Jo March in Little Women and Anne of Green Gables is: she was bright, independent, and constantly in trouble! The complex language and plucky heroine make today's vapid books for the Children's and Young Adults' market even more pathetic by contrast. If you look at the language of Victorian books, it's obvious that they didn't think children incapable of handling that kind of prose, and knew that if they encountered an unfamiliar word, they'd either figure it out from context or, if they were sufficiently interested in the story, find out from someone older or a dictionary. This book is fun both as a picture of turn-of-the-century small town life and as a reminder that some things never change. Rebecca's disasters with her beloved pink dress or the schoolboy with a crush who just won't leave her alone are just as easy to relate to as they were at the time they were written.
About the Author: Kate Douglas Wiggin (1856-1923) was an American educator and author of children's stories, most notably the classic children's novel Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. She started the first free kindergarten in San Francisco in 1878 (the Silver Street Free Kindergarten). With her sister during the 1880s, she also established a training school for kindergarten teachers. Kate Wiggin devoted her adult life to the welfare of children in an era when children were commonly thought of as cheap labor. During 1895 Kate Wiggin married a New York City businessman, George Christopher Riggs, who became her staunch supporter as her success increased. Her literary output included popular books for adults; with her sister, Nora A. Smith, she published scholarly work on the educational principles of Friedrich Froebel: Froebel's Gifts, Froebel's Occupations, and Kindergarten Principles and Practice; and she wrote the classic children's novel Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, as well as the 1905 best-seller Rose o' the River. Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm became an immediate bestseller; both it and Mother Carey's Chickens were adapted to drama. Houghton Mifflin collected her writings in ten volumes in 1917. For a time, she lived at Quillcote, her summer home in Hollis, Maine. Quillcote is around the corner from the town's library, the Salmon Falls Library, which Wiggin founded in 1911. Wiggin founded the Dorcas Society of Hollis & Buxton, Maine in 1897. The Tory Hill Meeting House in the adjacent town of Buxton inspired her book (and later play), The Old Peabody Pew.