Betsy’s Wedding by Maud Hart Lovelace begins where Betsy and the Great World ended: it is September 1914 and Betsy is on a ship, coming back to America after having spent the last nine months touring Europe. Waiting for her when she docks is Joe Willard, the boy she has loved since high school. Their past quarrels are forgotten and, now assured on one another’s love, the two young people are only too eager to start their life together. Less than a week later they are married and setting up house near Betsy’s family in Minneapolis.
The book covers the first few years of Betsy and Joe’s marriage, as Joe works and Betsy struggles to cook and keep house. They have their family nearby and almost all of their friends have stayed in the area (Betsy has been reunited with her beloved “Crowd”, who she missed so much while in Europe) so most of the book is devoted to Joe and Betsy’s interactions with others. This was my first introduction to Tacy, already married and, before the book is over, a mother of two, and to their other great friend, Tib, an outgoing German-American blonde whose speech is unnaturally peppered with German exclamations. I suddenly felt very thankful that neither of them had featured in Betsy and the Great World.
After reading two other Maud Hart Lovelace books, I should have known not to expect any emotional depth but, even so, I was disappointed by how shallow this book was. Betsy is full of resolutions when she gets married and, as she adjusts to married life, there are some fleeting reflections as she learns to adapt to life with Joe but, for the most part, any serious issue is ignored. Betsy mentions a few times the desire for a child but, when none appears, no comment is made as to her disappointment. Her writing career, which had been so important to her in previous books, is barely mentioned, except for when she turns down a writing job with the excuse “I already have a job…And it’s important, and very hard. It’s learning how to keep house.” Instead of emotional development, we get an action-filled account of what is going on with Betsy’s Crowd. Honestly, the two main challenges Betsy faces in this book are 1) learning how to cook (thank goodness she married a husband who knows how) and 2) finding a husband for her friend Tib, whose lack of interest in marriage shocks poor Betsy and Tacy:
“She isn’t even thinking about getting married!” Betsy cried. “She goes out all the time but she doesn’t give a snap for the men.”
“When girls don’t marry young,” Tacy said profoundly, “they get fussier all the time.”
“That’s right. You know the old saying about a girl going through the forest and throwing away all the straight sticks only to pick up a crooked one in the end.” Betsy looked wise as befitted an old married woman.
“There’s a lot of truth in that.”
“And Tib will soon be earning so much money that she won’t meet many men who earn as much money as she does.”
“That would be bad.”
“And then she’ll start driving around in her car, and getting more and more independent, and she won’t marry at all, maybe! And then what will she do when she’s old?”
Lovelace is partially tongue-in-cheek here, but only partially. There are dozens of things that mark this book as being of its time (1955) but none more than this. If I had read this passage as an eight or nine year old, I would have thrown the book down in disgust and returned to the non-Stepford –esque heroines in my books from forty or fifty years earlier.
Having now read this, I think I can safely put my interest in the series to rest. I have heard from a number of enthusiastic Betsy-Tacy fans since I started sampling Lovelace’s books but I am afraid I will never be able to count myself among their ranks. Still, it was interesting to read a few books from the series and I had much more patience for them now that I would have if I’d come to them as a child. I can at least understand their simple, nostalgic appeal, even if I don’t feel it.
The Captive Reader 
You’ve read the two weakest novels, which are probably not the best ones to start with. The other eight Betsy novels are much better on the whole and don’t dismiss the series without reading at least a couple of them.
Sounds like a book about Tib’s life would have been vastly so much more interesting. Good thing you didn’t read this when you were younger! I would have thrown it across the room as well.
You are completely missing the point of these books. They were written for children. A child would start reading these books at an early age and as she grew older would keep reading. Yet, like me, most would read the teenage and adult Betsy books while still quite young. So obviously the older Betsy ones are not going to get into their sex lives.
I could never understand the remark about how the early titles were off putting. Betsy-Tacy was about the two of them who formed a remarkable friendship. Betsy-Tacy-Tib was about the three of them. At they grew, their world grew – hence the titles Over the Big Hill. Downtown etc.
I loved the descriptions of clothes and Betsy’s doings and to call Betsy a Stepford Wife is to perverse. Betsy, born in 1892, was encouraged by her parents and teachers to develop her talents, as her sister, a singer was. Betsy, when she marries, is encouraged by her husband to write. He says to her, when they argue about whether to hire a maid, that “you are a writer.” His point is she needs the time to write. There is nothing Stepford about this, even though it is embedded in her desire to be a good wife and housewife, an entirely laudable and noncontroversial goal in the 1950s.
I guess it is all about tone. I loved Betsy and the crew and still do. But of course, Jane Eyre is my favourite novel, so this is not the book blog for me.
Don’t pick the books up again if you aren’t interested in them, but I agree that the last two are the weakest books in the series. Betsy’s much more fun when she’s younger — you get to see her doing a lot of different things and being adventurous, and Tacy and Tib are really pretty great. But I can see how these books wouldn’t work as well if you came to them later than childhood.