Connie Blair has sisters!

I just learned that Betty Cavanna wrote the Connie Blair mystery stories – apparently Betsy Allen was a pseudonym. If you haven’t read either one, this is about like learning forty years from now that actually Ann Brashares is a pseudonym and Meg Cabot wrote the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants books. (NB: not true, as far as I know.)

When I was a kid, I inherited a bunch of books from my mother’s girlhood, and even a few from my grandmother’s. From Grandmom there were a few Polly of Pebbly Pit books, a couple of Meadowbrook Girls books by Janet Aldridge (notable because one of the characters may be mentally retarded), and few really old ones, “Grandpa’s Little Girls and their Friends” by Alice Turner Curtis and two Marjorie Dean books. From Mom there were some of the Judy Bolton mysteries by Margaret Sutton, the Connie Blair ones from the fictional Betsy Allen, a few of the 1940s Nancy Drew and Dana Girl mysteries from the Stratemyer syndicate (I also had some Bobbsey Twins books, but I think those were newer). And there were some standalone books, a few from Mom and more from the library, teen romances from the likes of Rosamond du Jardin and Betty Cavanna.

I liked the Connie Blair mysteries; like Judy Bolton (and unlike Nancy Drew) she has a life between ‘cases’. When her father becomes ill, Connie and her twin sister Kit can’t go to college. Kit, something of a homebody, takes over the famly hardware store while Connie goes to live with a young aunt in Philadelphia and work for the Reid and Renshaw advertising agency. Her mystery-solving activities on behalf of the firm win her perks like art lessons, and so she gets to move up from her original job as a receptionist. There are other working women in the books, too, in their thirties or so, which is a nice thing to see in a 1950s book.

When I was reading them, Cavanna’s stand-alone books just felt like genre to me – pretty much interchangeable with other 1950s / early 1960s girls’ romances. I find, though, that I remember them individually, much more clearly than I remember, say, Beverly Cleary’s Jean and Johnny. I think it’s because in Cavanna’s books, the heroine is always doing something – riding horses, learning to paint, learning to ski or fly a plane, visiting a new country and becoming acquainted. There’s always a boy in the picture but not always a romance – at the end of A Girl Can Dream, in which two girls and one boy learn to fly, the boy presents corsages to *both* girls and it’s clear they’ll stay friends. There’s another whose title I forget where an American girl moves with her family to Brazil, meets a new boy and is asked to his house, and is shocked to realize his family is of mixed race. I think that one ends, not entirely satsifactorily, with the girl and her family returning to the Us at the end of her father’s tenure in Brazil. Still, it seems like strong meat for the times.

I’d like to see something similar but updated, and I’m not sure if there is much. There are fantasy books where girls and boys have quests that are bigger than themselves, but outside fantasy? There are romances, and growing-up stories, and stories of friendship, but are there stories where the girls (or women) get to do stuff and learn skills, and relationships are formed by bonding over common interests? Because that’s sort of been the story of my life, and I think it would have been really nice to read about it as a kid. In fact it was – but it would have been even nicer to read a current version.