Understood Betsy

Understood Betsy is a 1916 novel for children by Dorothy Canfield Fisher. The story tells of Elizabeth Ann a 9-year-old orphan who goes from a sheltered existence with her father's aunt Harriet and cousin Frances in the city to living on a Vermont farm with her mother's family the Putneys whose child-rearing practices had always seemed suspect to Harriet and her daughter. In her new rural life Elizabeth Ann comes to be nicknamed Betsy and to find that many activities that Frances had always thought too demanding for a little girl are considered by the Putney family routine activities for a child: walking to school alone cooking and having household duties to perform... (wikipedia.org)