The Page family home is very like the Shaw house in Louisa May Alcott’s An Old-Fashioned Girl (also a podcast): all show and expense and no comfort or friendliness. The contrasting portraits of the Carr family in Burnet, and the Agnew family in Boston, which are all pictures and children and love, are so much more appealing. She doesn’t write about the lives of the very rich on Rhode Island, but she does give a splendidly critical portrait of the home of the awful Lilly Page and her snobbish mother, which says everything we need to know about Coolidge’s views of their values in life. She lived in Cleveland, Ohio in New Haven, Connecticut and in Newport, Rhode Island. She was a prolific author of children’s novels and short stories for magazines, and a former nurse in the American Civil War. One person’s ‘good’ may be another person’s ‘not as romantic’ or ‘yet more drivel about children’s games’. I’m dubious about the rather vague critical opinions we can find online. There isn’t much information available about Susan Coolidge, the pen-name of Sarah Chauncey Woolsey (and aunt of the poet Gamel Woolsey) who died unmarried in 1905, aged 70. The last two of the Katy series, Clover and In the High Valley, are very good on the process of colonising the American West, when towns were growing but needed new inhabitants, but they lack the snap and powerful innocence of the Katy novels. These are the kinds of dresses that Katy and Mrs Ashe would have bought from Worth when they were in Paris.īut I am getting ahead of myself. There are other novels in the series, concerning Katy’s siblings and their adventures in life, but they’re not as strong. I used to trace them from a book of fashion history onto kitchen paper when I was a little girl, and spent days in the summer holidays lying outdoors on the grass colouring them in.

His parents worked for the fashion trade, and he specialised in portraits of parties in the later years of the 19th century, where the dresses are the focus: ruched, frilled, spotted, draped, gored, sweeping, acres and acres of fabric and trimmings, they’re just glorious. Think of the paintings of James Tissot, the French painter who worked mainly from Britain, who is most famous for his paintings of society ladies in wonderful dresses. The origins of my love of 19th-century fiction lie in the frocks.

You can also listen to the original podcast on Susan Coolidge and the What Katy Did books (1872, 1873, 1886) James Tissot, ‘The Gallery of HMS Calcutta (Portsmouth)’, 1870 This is another repost from the vaults of Why I Really Like This Book, a round-up of three books I reread addictively all through my childhood and early twenties.

Who wrote what katy did next