Helen Dore Boylston

Helen was born in 1894 in New Hampshire and died, after years of ill health in 1984, at a nursing home in New England.

She was the daughter of Joseph and Fannie Dore Boylston.   She was a lively girl and her nickname in the family was "Troub" as short for Trouble!
 She trained as a nurse, having considered being a doctor like her father.  She studied at the famous Massachusetts General hospital in Boston.
After her training, she joined a medical unit which supported the British army, and went to Europe.  She worked hard during World War One and found the work satisfying – more so than hospital work.  Then she spent some time, when the war was over, working with the Red Cross in Poland but found the work was done in an isolated fashion. She missed the companionship of war work.

She returned to Boston and Massachusetts General, where she taught anaesthesia, (an interest she gave to one of her characters, Connie).  She had met Rose Wilder Lane, the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, of “Little House on the Prairie” fame when she was abroad.   Rose was working in the literary and newspaper world and she read Helen’s war diary and had it published.

In the 1920s she returned to Europe and the Red Cross again, for a few years - and dabbled in writing, using the various kinds of nursing that she had experienced. In 1926, she and Rose Wilder travelled to Albania in an old car and lived there for a time, both of them writing.  She loved adventure and her work and wondered if, it had not been for the War, she would have settled for the feminine path of getting married and giving up her nursing. But her wartime service had created an appetite for “living life” and adventure in her, and she clearly felt that she could not give it up, to settle into conventional marriage.

I haven’t been able to find a biography of Helen Boylston, but I have loved her “Sue” books from childhood. If I weren’t so squeamish, I might have considered nursing or medicine.

but I’d love also to know more about her than the few internet articles that I’ve traced.

After Albania, she returned to America with Rose, and they shared a house for a time. Helen had inherited some money and wanted to devote herself to writing.

Rose was also a writer who edited her mother’s tales of life on the prairie…and was a political journalist.

Helen had been partly financially independent but she lost money in the Crash and had to return to nursing for a time.

Then in the 1930s, she began her series of “young adult” nursing novels about “Sue Barton”.  They were a hit... very popular with girls who were interested in a nursing career. At the time, few women became doctors but nursing had a shorter training, and many girls were keen on the idea.  The idea of being “angels” looking after the sick or “Florence Nightingale” was very popular among young girls, but Helen’s novels were realistic about nursing and about growing up (within the limits of the young adult fiction genre).

 

Sue is not a rabidly ambitious career girl… yet she wants to work, for a few years once she qualifies as a nurse.  So she insists on going to New York to nurse in the Henry St settlement, among the poor. She wants to “help her husband” in his work when he plans to become a country doctor.  She works with him as hospital superintendent in his new country hospital for the first three years of her marriage but then gives up for some years, to have children.  However, when Bill Barry, her husband, becomes ill, and has to go to a Sanatorium, Sue returns to work as a staff nurse. For the time, she is a good role model for women wanting to go on working after marriage.  She gives up her staff nurse job again, when Bill recovers... Still she often helps out as a substitute district nurse, and it seems likely that (like Nurse Pat Glennon in the last book) she will return to work when her children are older.

Boylston also wrote a series of “Girls career novels” about acting, when she had gotten Sue “married off and having a baby”...  

For this series, she created Carol Page, a budding actress, getting information about acting training from a friend, Eve Le Gallienne. Later she returned to the Barton series and wrote her two last Sue novels, Neighbourhood Nurse and “Staff Nurse”.

I have only managed to find one of the Carol novels, and it’s not as much fun somehow as the Barton ones.  However it is enjoyable and again realistic.

I’d love to find out more about Helen Boylston.  She never married and when she died, she had no known relatives and was a very old sick lady. but she had had a wonderful life and created a very popular and well loved heroine in Sue.