Betsy and the Great World

Betsy Ray goes to Europe in 1914, alone, for a year, instead of to college. It is the ninth book of ten, and Deep Valley stays behind. What is in front of her is a ship, an itinerary and a trunk.

It is a travel book with a clock running underneath it. A boat that calls at the Azores, Madeira, Gibraltar and Algiers, then Genoa, a run of German towns including Munich and Bayreuth, then Venice, Lucerne, Paris, and London at the end. Lovelace wrote it out of the journals of her own 1914 trip, and the texture is the practical business of the thing: finding rooms, the routine of a pensione, learning a city on a small allowance. German troops are massing while Betsy is occupied with none of it. The reader knows what she cannot, that this is the summer which ends in August, and England's declaration of war ends the year and sends her home.

It is the odd volume of the series. A reader who came for a small Minnesota town and the same few friends in it is handed a solitary young woman in foreign hotels, and it takes a while to accept that the trade is the point, since the whole series has been pushing Betsy outward. It lands for readers who have gone the distance with her, and it is the one book where she is entirely on her own. She comes home and marries Joe Willard in the next one.