Miss Billy

Description

Miss Billy by Eleanor H. Porter is a delightful story about a girl being mistaken for a boy – a book so well-written, with a story intriguing that it is no wonder it stayed at the top of the best-sellers list for weeks at the time it was first published in 1911.

Well-known for her children’s story, romances and adventure stories, Eleanor H. Porter knew and understood young people, especially young girl like no other writer. The protagonist of the story is an eighteen-year-old girl who becomes an orphan and as she has no relatives, she decides to contact one of her late father’s friends in Boston, Billy Henshaw, the man she was named after and to ask him to take her in. She signs the letter as Billy, which gives rise to lots of confusion because the addressee of the letter believes the sender of the letter to be a boy. He invites Billy to live with them and the surprise comes when Billy arrives to live in a household with her father’s friend and his two younger brothers. The family asks an aunt to come and live with them as the girl’s chaperone, but the girl finds that living with the Henshaws is not as she has imagined it to be and goes away to college and to travel in Europe. The last part of the novel is about Billy’s life after she returns to Boston and establishes herself as an independent young woman.

The novel is full of funny situations and Billy is a lively, very loveable character as well. She brings life to the Henshaw house and she changes their lives for the better, but not without changing herself, so Miss Billy is an excellent coming-of-age novel and adventure story that can be heartily recommended to readers of any age.
[amz_corss_sell asin=”1775429768″]