 A Real New England Girl by Anna I. Parsons 1. The Shower 2. Oxford County 3. The Stranger and the Girl 4. The Youth and the Girl 5. Pansy and Richard Go Trading 6. The Marvelous Storyteller 7. The Dinner 8. The The Minister Comes for Tea 9. Pansy's Father 10. Pansy and Her Mother 11. Poland Springs 12. The Birthday Cake 13. Ned Patterson Comes for a Visit 14. The Blue Berrying Party 15. The Beginning of Wisdom 16. The Tempted and the Penitent 17. The Concert 18. Stanley's Ride 19. The Bench by the Wayside 20. The Banker and the Widow 21. The Bag of Nuts 22. How They Kept Thanksgiving at Little Farm 23. Hardly a Merry Christimas 24. A Call Down and a Caller 25. The Pride of Mrs. Bradford 26. A Happy New Year 27. Amusement and Winter Sport 28. Kim 29. Richard, the Lion Hearted 30. A Tour of the White Mountains 31. Talking Over the Trip with Henry Bright 32. Thoughts That Lie Too Deep for Words 33. Economics 34. His Toast 35. The Busy Haunts of Man 36. Christmas in New York 37. The Last Night of Their Visit 38. The Language Understood by All 39. Sugaring Off 40. Correspondence 41. Commencement 42. Conclusion Afterward     |
by Anna Isabel Parsons, LL. B. ca. 1915 Edited by Jeffrey R. Parsons To my brothers and sisters, Apphia, John, Dora, Mary and Oscar, all of whom still reside at South Paris, Maine, this book is affectionately dedicated. EDITOR'S FOREWORD In the early 1970s my wife and I came across this manuscript tucked away in a drawer at the family farm in South Paris. Over the next few years we read bits of it during summer visits to the farm. My aunt and parents joined in, and for several years it was our custom to occasionally read sections aloud to each other in the evenings as a form of amusement. We all agreed that the novel would never win the Nobel Prize for literature, but nonetheless it had a certain appeal to all of us. My father and aunt had known Anna I. Parsons -- she was their formidable Aunt Annie, a regular summer visitor to the farm, her birthplace, during their childhood years in the 1910s and early 1920s. I never met Aunt Annie myself, but from my father and aunt I had heard numerous stories about her over the years, well before I came to read the novel myself. I knew that she was regarded by them with a mixture of dismay and affection; that she was good hearted but occasionally severe; that she was generous but strict; that she understood very little about children; that she was somewhat egotistical and intolerant; that she was used to getting in own way in family matters. So, I was well prepared for what I read in her novel. Anna Isabel Parsons was born at the South Paris farm on Dec. 30, 1869, the third child of Stephen Robinson Parsons and Mary Thomas Parsons. The family, when complete, comprised six children (Apphia [1865-1923], John [1867-1934], Anna [1869-1950], Dora [1871-1950], Mary [1875-1962], and my grandfather Oscar [1879-1922]). Anna, together with her brothers and sisters, grew up on the farm, attended local primary school, and went to Hebron Academy for her highschool education, graduating in 1888. She taught at local schools several terms after that, and worked summers (and sometimes through the Fall and up to Christmas and through the Winter) between 1887 and 1893 at several different resort hotels throughout New England, New Jersey, and California. At some point in the mid 1890s, Anna went to live permanently in New York City, where she began to work as a professional court stenographer. She remained unmarried. About a decade later she began to show the first signs of deafness, and at that point she knew her days as a court stenographer were numbered. So, with characteristic energy and determination, she attended law school at New York University, in the night-school division, graduating with a law degree in 1906. This was a time, of course, when there were few professional women lawyers, and she was the only woman in her class, and older than most of her fellow graduates. From that time she was employed for about 40 years as a real-estate lawyer by a New York City firm. It was from this base in New York that she made annual summer visits to her childhood home at the South Paris farm, and it was during this period that my father (Merton S. Parsons, 1907-1982) and aunt (Bernice Parsons Paul, b. 1909) became acquainted with her. This was also the time when she wrote the novel, a fictionalized account of her childhood home, which contained, one suspects, some autobiographical aspects. After Anna's retirement from the law, at about the end of World War II, she emigrated to California, together with her sister Dora, to live in Santa Paula, where her youngest sister Mary had resided since 1919. She died in Santa Paula in 1950, and the novel was discovered among her effects by one of her nieces, Mary Clifford Colley (b. 1898), who saved it from the trash pile (where it would surely have gone without her interference) and returned it to the farm in South Paris a few years later. In this fashion the novel made its way into the drawer in the farm parlor where, roughly 15 years later, I stumbled upon it myself. Any would-be reader will quickly find that A Real New England Girl has very limited appeal as a literary work; it is easy to understand why it was never published. Its importance lies in its value as a commentary on early 20th century rural and small-town society in northern New England. Social mores, recreation, farm life, the gendered division of rural labor, school and church activities, summer visitors -- all these, and more, are grist for the author's mill. Future historians may find this interesting and informative. Anna typed the manuscript, so it was easy enough to read. In transcribing it, I have made very few changes, only occasionally modifying spelling and punctuation, and correcting a tiny handful of grammatical errors. --Jeffrey R. Parsons June 1998 Click Here for Chapter 1 |