Susan Coolidge 1835-1905

Susan Coolidge was an American author for girls and like many kids, as a child I read her famous stories, “What Katy Did” and its sequels.  They are still popular, but I have never been able to find out much about the author. 

Her real name was Sarah Chauncey Woolsey... And she was born to a well-known and well to do New England family. New Englanders had an aristocracy of families of English origin, who were usually intellectually minded and liberal in their politics.  They were usually anti-Slavery, for example.

Coolidge worked as a nurse during the American Civil war and after the War she wrote her novels.  Like Louisa M Alcott, she lived most of her life in New England –at Newport Rhode Island - but made occasional trips to Europe.

She wrote “What Katy Did” in 1872 and continued to write books for children and also biographies of literary figures, for the rest of her life.  Like Alcott, she never married.

The story of the Carr family is based on Coolidge’s own memories of her childhood.  Katy is a harum-scarum girl of 12 - the eldest of six children, and has ideas of being an artist.  However she is always in trouble, in a mild way and it is not until she has an accident, which leaves her bedridden for 4 years that she begins to grow up. From her bed, she learns how to manage the house, and to look after her siblings. 

In a few years, her back injury is cured and she is able to walk again.  In the next book “What Katy did at school”, she and her sister Clover go to boarding school and have more adventures.  In the third book in the series, she goes on a trip to Europe with an older friend and meets the man she is going to marry.

As the books are Victorian children’s stories, they are somewhat heavily “moral”.  Katy’s accident is the result of disobeying her Aunt... and she learns from the bad experience.  When she goes to School, she is shocked that the teenage girls at the school flirt with the young men at the nearby College. Yet somehow I never found them quite as irritatingly “moralistic” as Little Women and other Alcott books.
I’m glad to find that they are still loved by today’s young girls.