Long before the fictional society debut of Blair Waldorf or Serena Van Der Woodsen, or the ascendancy of Bella Swan, there were Betsy Ray, Tacy Kelly, and Tib Muller, protagonists of the Betsy-Tacy book series by Maud Hart Lovelace.  As a girl, these were my most favoritest books—even more than the iconic Little House on the Prairie series.  As an adult, I have been saddened to see their popularity wane. 

Like Laura Ingalls Wilder, Lovelace bases her stories on her own experiences growing up in Minnesota, though the Betsy-Tacy stories are set in a residential neighborhood at the turn of the 19th-to-20th century instead of the homesteads of Wilder’s books.  The novels center on the three girlfriends, following their adventures from age five through Betsy’s first year of marriage, the symbolic end of their girlhoods.  One of the great pleasures of the books is the girls’ mischievousness, their spirit of adventure and cameraderie.  In the second book, Betsy-Tacy and Tib, the girls chop off their long hair for a pact, horrifying their parents.  Though the period details and social mores are now curiosities, the girls’ friendships, struggles, adventures, and ambitions transcend their setting.  As a girl I envied their easy intimacy, their boldness, their free reign of the neighborhood and town, though perhaps most of all I coveted Tacy’s red ringlets. 

Why, I wondered, had the books lost their appeal for today’s young readers?  Especially given the enduring popularity of the Little House books (“Laura, Laura, Laura!!!,” my inner-Jan Brady whines), it baffled me to see these heroines struggling to remain in print.  Years ago, when I gave the first two books to my young niece—a voracious consumer of serial fiction—as a birthday present, she looked as if I had handed her carrot sticks on Halloween night.  All her favorite books seemed to center on fairies, gateways to secret realms, metaphysical adventures.  Had Harry Potter and his ilk left her with a steroidal addiction to magic?  Were the classics simply not enough of a thrill ride?

I’ve held on to my dog-eared set of Betsy-Tacy volumes, intending to pass them on to my own child someday, but it never occurred to me to read them again for my own enjoyment.  Until last week, when I ran across an item in New York magazine announcing the reissue of the final six volumes of the series (with essays from contemporary authors like Anna Quindlen and Meg Cabot) and declaring Betsy, Tacy, and Tib both the original Gossip Girls and proto-feminists.  I’m not so sure about that, the Gossip Girl comparison especially.  Sure, they had conflicts and scandals, but they were all chaste, of relatively modest means, and to my memory, never made a sport of backstabbing.  The feminist angle I’m intrigued by, however, and it’s making me want to go dig out the series from my bookcase.  I’ll let you know what I discover…and in the meantime, let us know:  Who were your girlhood literary heroines, fictional or real?  Are your favorites still topping bestseller lists?  Why might they have persisted or fallen out of favor?

(Those interested may also want to read an appreciation of the series by Meg Cabot, whose Princess Diaries books were influenced by her own reading of the Betsy-Tacy series.)