Wednesday, April 13, 2016

Sue Barton, Visiting Nurse, by Helen Dore Boylston


Looking at the lists of books published in 1938, I didn't find too many for children or young adults. I was expecting to see one of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books there, but that year fell between On the Banks of Plum Creek and By the Shores of Silver Lake. I did notice though when I completed my Sue Barton collection that the third in the series, Sue Barton, Visiting Nurse, was published in 1938, so I decided to re-read it (for the umpteenth time).

I wrote about this book in the early days of my blog (my original post is here). Briefly, it is the story of Sue Barton and her friend Kit Van Dyke, newly-qualified nurses who come to New York City to work in the Henry Street Settlements (a real place). As visiting nurses, they go into the immigrant neighborhoods and the tenements to provide home health care. Sue, who is secretly engaged to the handsome doctor Bill Barry, wants to work for a time before marriage. She falls in love with settlement work and is reluctant to give it up, despite increasing pressure from Bill.

Reading this book again, I was struck by a couple of things. First, there is nothing in the story that ties it specifically to the late 1930s. There are no references to current events or politics. People are out of work, but there is no mention of the Depression. Sue does think at one point that "This was the way the nurses in the Great War had had to work, making the best of what meagre equipment they had -" (and Helen Dore Boylston knew all about that from her own war-time nursing) - which would suggest a book written before World War II. There are also a couple of references to a fellow nurse, Miss Glines, whom Sue mentally categorizes as a "whoops-my-dear" type, a phrase that immediately made me think of the 1920s and Bright Young Things in stockings and gin. This lack of specifics in the setting here carries over in the later books, which were published in the 1940s and early 1950s but never mention the Second World War, even in passing.

Second, reading this again reminded me how much I love stories about young women coming to the Big City and making good. For stories set in the United States, this usually means New York. Here Sue and Kit get to live in a cozy little red-brick house in Greenwich Village, with a view of the Empire State Building. They can afford it because the rent is ridiculously low, due to rumors that the house is haunted. They also get to stay in luxury with cousins of Kit in their apartment on Central Park West. On their free days, they can wander the city and play tourist. And their Henry Street uniforms open doors everywhere. Helen Boylston lived in New York herself at different times, and she clearly loved it. Her city has slums and dirt and poverty, but it's full of life and energy - and very little crime. I'd love to visit her city. And reading this made me want to re-read other New York books, like All-of-a-Kind Family and The Saturdays, and watch some Rosalind Russell movies ("His Girl Friday" or "My Sister Eileen" - and "The Women").

N.B. In my original post, I mistakenly wrote that this book was published in 1939.

12 comments:

  1. You're right about the timelessness - I read these books as a child and I had no idea that they were set decades earlier, or indeed across the Atlantic. Such are the qualities of Helen Dore Boylston's writing. I'd love to read them again, but I read library copies first time around and the books don't seem too readily available over here.

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  2. I remember when they were really hard to find over here as well. I was hoping the recent reprints would make them more readily available, but apparently not. If you lived closer I would absolutely lend them to you!

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  3. When is Call the Midwife set? I'll look it up, but it would interesting to compare the nursing details in this series to that one. Also, I have a large set of the Cherry Ames books, and it would be good to compare these to Cherry, too. Perhaps the Cherry Ames books (which came out of Grossett and Dunlap, I believe, along with Nancy Drew) are not as well written as the Sue Barton ones?

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    1. Hi, Sherry - thanks for stopping by! I think Call the Midwife is set after World War II, but I'm just going by the episodes I've seen.

      I loved the Cherry Ames books too, though I never found all the later books in that long series! When I re-read some of them a few years ago, I thought they were less realistic than the Sue Barton books - more adventures and less nursing. And my childhood obsession with Nancy Drew has definitely worn off :)

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  4. Don't you love rereading old favorites? I should make more time for rereading the books I grew up loving than I do. :)

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    1. I do, Lark :) I have a couple of shelves of childhood favorites, and I do re-read them (especially Laura Ingalls Wilder and Louisa May Alcott).

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  5. I got so excited when I saw this post pop up in my reader! I loooooved these books when I was a kid, and Visiting Nurse was always my very most favorite one. I love how Kit and Sue get their own little house together, and Sue gets to see all the patients. Bill's kind of a poop, but since he's ALWAYS kind of a poop, it's not too huge a surprise. :p

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    1. The book is so much fun before Bill starts looming! I think my favorite is the last one, where he's in the TB sanitarium and Sue gets to go back to nursing while still being the world's greatest mom (much like my own mother :)

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  6. I think I would like this book--I like stories about young women who venture into the city also, both fiction and non-fiction. Takes a lot of courage.

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  7. It does! When I look back on moving to Houston, almost 25 years ago now I can't believe how naive I was - and how lucky that everything went so smoothly.

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  8. This is such a great pick for the 1938 read -- I remember thinking how exotic the locations were when I read them: one of the delights of all these children's books people mention is how one remembers the settings all over again as an adult traveller. I suspect a cheap rent in New York might be out of the question though!

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  9. Especially in Greenwich Village! New York is the setting for some of my favorite childhood books, and I feel like I know the city through them. I hope to visit someday, and see if I can find at least some of the settings.

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Thank you for taking the time to read, and to comment. I always enjoy hearing different points of view about the books I am reading, even if we disagree!