Pollyooly: A romance of long felt wants and the red haired girl who filled them (1912). By: Edgar Jepson: [Book 1 in the Pollyooly series. Illustrated By: Hanson Booth (1886-1944). Paperback – April 29, 2018]

A LONG TIME AGO, when I was a little girl in school, I ran out of things to read. i had pretty well read my way through the (limited) library, and later when I was a little older, all the teachers’ subscription magazines. (There were only four teachers; it was a small school.) I remember in desperation picking up a tatty book with a weird title I had never heard of. I think now that the contents of the library comprised all the old books that people in the school district donated. I took the book home to read probably because the name reminded me of Pollyanna, the eponymous heroine I had enjoyed reading about, but from the same vintage (Pollyanna, by Eleanor Porter, published in Boston in 1913). It lasted longer, as anyone knows. I received my copy as a Christmas present in 1940; the film based on it, starring Hayley Mills, was released in 1960.

I never met anyone who had read Pollyooly but I wondered about it, and never forgot the name. On a whim last week I googled it and found the information I have printed above. I remember she had red hair. Now, seeing the closeness of the books’ pub dates, and the similarity of the heroines’ names, I wondered if the earlier one influenced the other. I looked up red hair first to see if their colouring was the same. Nope. Pollyanna had flaxen hair ("hair of the pale yellow colour of dressed flax”). To find that, I had to go to the Gutenberg Library.

[Project Gutenberg (PG) is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, as well as to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks." It was founded in 1971 by American writer Michael S. Hart and is the oldest digital library.] Wikipedia A Canada PG also exists, and a London one. I’ve used it before, though for much earlier work, for resaerch. This search was spurred by a whim.

It hooked me.

Blog, Interrupted.

Having discovered the colour of her hair in the first pages of Pollyanna, I kept on reading. You know me: I can’t be trusted with a book. I just keep on reading. Matt knows me, too. Having finished the episode he was viewing (he’s working his way through “Dawson’s Creek”, 1998 TV drama, 6 seasons), he got ready for bed and said goodnight. I usually go ahead of him. About an hour later he came to tell me to stop reading and go to bed. (His father used to do that, too.) I had almost finished the book—a short one, thank goodness.

So here I am, early the next morning, checking in, with not much information about Pollyooly (the second volume is in the GP). I don’t think there was any connection between the two books, but a mystery has been solved.

See, if you live long enough, that can happen.