Product Description
Judith Lankester, 15 years old, and raised in the luxury of her grandmother s Virginia plantation, has made the arduous journey with her widowed mother and her seven sisters to the home of her grandparents in Indiana. Though her mother, Charity, had married away from the Quaker lifestyle, she had always maintained her faith and convictions. After her husband s death, she freed his slaves, settled them on their own land and used the last of the family s resources to travel to Indiana. Welcomed in Grandfather Halloway s home, Charity hopes to set up her loom and begin weaving cloth to sell. The older girls all except for Judith also wish to help. The rawness of the pioneer dwellings and way of life offend Judith s love of beauty and refinement. She wants to return to the silk and elegance of her grandmother s home. Except for her gift with young children and skill in fine sewing, she has nothing to contribute to their new way of life. At Grandfather Halloway s suggestion, she goes to live with the Huff family to help out, but also to learn practical household skills. It is in this kindly crucible that Judith must come to terms with herself, with her family s Quaker faith and convictions especially on the subject of slavery and of where, and with whom, she will spend her future years. This warm, believable tale about the meaning of freedom and its responsibility is vividly set against the background of social and industrial change in the 1840 s in the period leading up to the American Civil War.
About the Author
Marjorie Hill Allee was born on June 2, 1890. She grew up on the Indiana farm that had been in the family since the early migration of Quakers from the Carolinas a resettlement of which she writes in a number of her books. After two years of college, and a year of teaching all eight grades in the schoolhouse she herself attended, she continued her own education at the nascent University of Chicago. It was here that she met her husband, Warder Clyde Allee. His profession as a zoologist led the family to live and work in interesting locations, giving Mrs. Allee a wide range of backgrounds and cultures to draw upon for her books. One example is Jane s Island a Newbery Honor Book that uses for its setting the well-known Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. She wrote 13 fiction books for young people, as well as a non-fiction one called Jungle Island. This latter title (with her husband as co-author) was actually her first published book and grew out of a year s sojourn in Panama which the Allees had made following the tragic death of their ten-year-old son, Warder.
Mrs. Allee s writing agreeably co-existed with a domestic life as wife to a busy scientist/teacher and as mother of her two daughters, Barbara and Mary. An article by her life-long friend Amy Winslow in Horn Book (May, 1946) notes that upon hitting a block in her writing, Mrs. Allee learned to lapse into passivity, to hunt for some different occupation, preferably monotonous and undemanding on the mind, and let the conflict settle itself . . . . In this same article, she is further quoted as saying, In the case of a person like myself, whose real occupation is housekeeping, this can be arranged one way or another. . . . Susanna on her old white horse first came riding toward me beyond an ironing board. (See: Susanna and Tristram and its sequel The Road to Carolina.)
Marjorie Hill Allee died in April, 1945.