ion> WHAT KATY DID Susan Coolidge Harper Press An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road Hammersmith London W6 8JB Susan Coolidge asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Life & Times section © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd Gerard Cheshire asserts his moral rights as author of the Life & Times section Classic Literature: Words and Phrases adapted from
Collins English Dictionary
Source ISBN: 9780007920648 Ebook Edition © September 2012 ISBN: 9780007502752 Version: 2014-11-12 All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. CONTENTS Copyright History of Collins Life & Times To Five Chapter 1 The Little Carrs Chapter 2 Paradise
Chapter 3 The Day of Scrapes
Chapter 4 Kikeri
Chapter 5 In the Loft
Chapter 6 Intimate Friends
Chapter 7 Cousin Helen’s Visit
Chapter 8 To-Morrow
Chapter 9 Dismal Days
Chapter 10 St. Nicholas and St. Valentine
Chapter 11 A New Lesson to Learn
Chapter 12 Two Years Afterward
Chapter 13 At Last
Classic Literature: Words and Phrases adapted from the Collins English Dictionary
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What Katy Did
The title of this novel is intended as a subtle joke around a play on words. In the US, bush-crickets are known as katydids, because the males elicit a mating call that sounds like the trisyllabic mantra ‘ka-ty-did’. On the original front cover of What Katy Did, there was a drawing of five anthropomorphic katydids. The joke is that the katydid insects see and tell ‘what Katy did’ as she goes about her tomboyish mischief in the story. The author imagines they are saying, ‘Katy did this, Katy did that’ as ever-present tattletales, in much the same way that young children are driven to tell the truth about the wrongdoings of their siblings and friends. The Author and her Female Contemporaries Susan Coolidge was the oddly modern-sounding pen name of Sarah Chauncey Woolsey, the daughter of wealthy American parents from Cleveland, Ohio. She worked as a nurse during the American Civil War. Woolsey was 30 years old when the war ended and she decided to devote her life to writing children’s books. Curiously, she never had children or married, despite her interest in children’s literature. Woolsey published What Katy Did in 1872, at the age of 37, and established herself on the literary stage. She continued authoring books until her death in 1905, at the age of 70. Parallels can be drawn between What Katy Did, The Secret Garden (1911), by Francis Hodgson Burnett, and Pollyanna (1913), by Eleanor H. Porter. All three books tackle the subject of paraplegic paralysis in one way or another. In What Katy Did, the eponymous Katy admires the robustness and goodness of her invalid cousin Helen. She then suffers temporary paralysis herself, due to a fall from a swing, and Helen teaches her how to cope with her affliction until she recovers. In The Secret Garden, there is a reversal, in which Mary teaches her sickly cousin Colin to fight his affliction and learn to walk again. In Pollyanna, the eponymous Pollyanna is paralyzed when struck
