Hit Back, Hitty!

Since she’s too ladylike to hit, I’ll throw a few punches on her behalf!

I’d like a “Read Banned Books” sticker just for great girls’ books. Especially those purged from the libraries of elite schools. Like my favorite, Rachel Field’s Hitty: Her First Hundred Years, winner of the 1929 Newbery award. Her name is short for “Mehitabel,” and not for nothing does it mean “God rejoices.” The book details the life and times—from the moment she was first carved—of a wooden doll. No matter what happens, count on a level-headed, if not wry response to any seemingly insurmountable situation. Perched on an antique store’s “very untidy desk,” her back against a pewter inkstand, Hitty writes with a quill instead of one of those “newfangled” fountain pens of which she disapproves:

I must have been made something over a hundred years ago in the State of Maine in the dead of winter. Naturally I remember nothing of this, but I have heard the story told so often by one or another of the Preble family that at times it seems I, also, must have looked on as the Old Peddler carved me out of his piece of mountain-ash wood.