Classic Starts: Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (Classic Starts® Series) - Hardcover

Retold From The Kate Douglas Wiggin Original

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1402736932 ISBN 13: 9781402736933

Publisher: Sterling, 2007

Synopsis

Eleven-year-old Rebecca Randall is quite a handfuland now shes leaving her beloved Sunnybrook Farm to live with her well-to-do elderly aunts and get an education. But they were expecting Rebeccas quiet, hard-working older sister instead. Can the bright-eyed and talkative girl win them overespecially her strict, rule-bound Aunt Miranda? Just as Rebeccas grand spirit charms everyone in the story, it will captivate readers, too.

About this title

Review:

Author Jack London wrote Kate Douglas Wiggin a letter about her classic Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm from the headquarters of the First Japanese Army in Manchuria in 1904: "May I thank you for Rebecca?... I would have quested the wide world over to make her mine, only I was born too long ago and she was born but yesterday.... Why could she not have been my daughter? Why couldn't it have been I who bought the three hundred cakes of soap? Why, O, why?" Mark Twain called Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm "beautiful and warm and satisfying".

Who is this beguiling creature? The irrepressible 10-year-old Rebecca Rowena Randall burst into the world of children's book characters (and her new life in Maine) in 1903 when storybook girls were gentle and proper. A "bird of a very different feather", she had "a small, plain face illuminated by a pair of eyes carrying such messages, such suggestions, such hints of sleeping power and insight, that one never tired of looking into their shining depths." Soon enough, she wins over her prim Aunt Miranda, the whole town and thousands of readers everywhere with her energetic, indomitable spirit. This beautiful trade edition features the artwork of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm's original illustrator Helen Mason Grose, with 6 full-colour plates and 32 pen-and-ink drawings. (Ages 9 and older)

About the Author:

Kate Douglas Wiggin was born Kate Douglas Smith on September 28, 1856, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the older of two girls. When her father died during the Civil War, her mother moved the family to Portland, Maine. Her mother then remarried and had another child; a boy. Kate’s education was spotty, sometimes being tutored by her stepfather, then to three additional schools. The family moved to Santa Barbara, California in 1873, hoping to remedy her stepfather’s lung problems, but he died in 1876. In 1878, Kate founded the first free Kindergarten in San Francisco, then began training other teachers. In 1881, she married Samuel Bradley Wiggin, a lawyer, and was forced to resign from her teaching position. They had no children and he died in 1889. Wiggin began writing books to raise money for the school, then later, other children’s charities. In 1895, she married George Christopher Riggs, a New York City businessman. In 1903, she wrote her most famous work, “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm,” which became an immediate bestseller and years later, was made into a movie starring Shirley Temple. In 1923, Kate traveled to England as a delegate to the Dickens Fellowship. There, she caught pneumonia and died on August 24, 1923, at the age of 66. She was cremated and her ashes were scattered over the Saco River in Maine.

About this edition

• Publisher: Sterling
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1402736932
• ISBN 13: 9781402736933
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 160