Miss Lizzie
All my life a friendly, ageless woman has accompanied me, waiting for me to grow up and meet her for coffee. I would visit her whenever I went to my grandparents’ house in Alton, Illinois, where she lived in a book on a shelf upstairs in my aunt’s old bedroom. She was created before my parents were born, inhabiting the detailed watercolors of sisters and professional illustrators Florence and Margaret Hoopes in the third-grade reader of the Alice and Jerry series‚ the reader titled Through the Green Gate.
It was the pictures that drew me in, but as I reread the stories of this 190-page book, through my high school and college years, I began to see the woman herself and the stories built around her as fully dimensional.
In my twenties, I recognized the introvert in her, the woman who loved being in a flow state of gardening or baking by herself, and who mostly did her conversations on a deep level and one-on-one. Extraverts might have seen her as the fun-loving lady who welcomed all the kids to her house at once and gave them cake. Adventurers of all kinds would identify her as a spontaneous spirit who left with two friends on short notice to see the circus close down in the next town.
In addition to her love of the color blue and her constant gardening, I have, over time, taken note of these traits:
she lives at the edge of the civilized world;
she spends a lot of time in solitude, in nature, only venturing into the village for errands, necessary conversations or church;
she has one cat, her close companion and only cohabitant;
she is considered a confidant and guide by the village children;
she seems to change in personality and physical stature (the text says this) when she wears certain clothes (“her hat with the gay red roses”) and comes into the village, then change back when she returns to her own garden and changes into everyday clothing.
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Miss Lizzie is the anchoring character in the introduction and three stories that make up Through the Green Gate, first published in 1939 by Row, Peterson & Co., which eventually became HarperCollins through mergers and acquisitions. The Alice and Jerry series was developed under direction of Mabel O’Donnell, who reshaped children’s readers (more than 100 million copies sold) and had an elementary school, still open and thriving, in Aurora, Illinois, named after her.
I have only just learned that O’Donnell lived until 1985. Which meant that all those years I was rereading her books at Grandma’s, clear into my twenties, O’Donnell—who lived in Aurora her entire life—was less than five hours away, just outside Chicago.
Working in a time when teaching likely was one of her few professional options, O’Donnell took it and ran, earning a doctorate from the University of Chicago, becoming a principal and curriculum coordinator in Aurora, and eventually resigning to work as an editor for her book publisher.
She borrowed from several previously published stories in creating Through the Green Gate and the other Alice and Jerry readers. The back page of Green Gate contains the text, “Special acknowledgment is accorded the following authors who generously furnished textbook rights on original stories from which ideas were taken and adaptations were made.” The authors and stories are then named (two of these four women, Lavinia Davis and Margaret Friskey, come up readily in an online search), and the text states which chapter of Green Gate each story was “adapted into.”
As for the reader’s introduction—which is titled “Miss Lizzie” and introduces and describes her, her house, its setting, what she likes to do, her relationship to the village children and their respect for her—nothing is cited as having been “adapted into” it.
I haven’t hunted down the specific stories cited to look for someone like Miss Lizzie, but it seems clear that none of the acknowledged authors created her. Mabel O’Donnell did.
Was she modeled on a woman O’Donnell knew? Was she developed based on figures from classic myths and fairy tales, which I expect O’Donnell studied thoroughly? To what degree did her powers reflect those of O’Donnell herself? Did Miss Lizzie—who appears now to me as a shapeshifter and archetypal wise woman—make her way into these stories through the collective unconscious?
I like to imagine that if I had thought of these questions when I was in college, I could have written O’Donnell and asked her—if I had been as intelligent and as directed in my imagination as she was.
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In my mid-forties my life changed, and for a short period, about three years, I lived alone with one cat in my own little house in a neighborhood separated from the rest of town by a river. My house stood close to the edge of that neighborhood; I could walk to the river, the forest, the fields. I worked with college students, who often came to my house, who helped me in my garden and confided in me. I encouraged them. And I took out the old reader, which I had brought home after my grandmother died, from my own shelf. Miss Lizzie was starting to look like an older version of me, but with a kind of mystique and power that I didn’t share.
I visited her again a couple of days ago and see now that her old-fashioned clothes are just a disguise. She is younger than my mother now but still older than I am. I asked her what she thought I should do about my work life, and she looked straight at me and told me that she could have told me the answer a long time ago if I had only asked.