Denise and I were doing our Saturday morning lakefront walk - one of those late spring Chicago mornings where the fog hasn't burned off yet and the city feels like it belongs to a different century - when I started this. And honestly? A 1916 girls' school novel felt exactly right for that kind of morning. Like finding a handwritten letter tucked inside a used bookstore paperback.
Here's what got me: Harriet Lummis Smith was a high school teacher. I didn't know that going in. Twenty years in the classroom myself, and I picked up on it within the first half hour. The way she writes about the social hierarchies among these girls - the unspoken rules, the tiny cruelties disguised as tradition, the way one student's academic success becomes a social liability - that's not something you research. That's something you've watched happen from behind a desk while pretending to grade papers.
A Former Teacher Writing What She Knew
This is the third book in the Friendly Terrace series, and Smith drops you into The Girl's High School with Peggy, Amy, Priscilla, and Ruth already established as a friend group. The plot threads are surprisingly modern for 1916. There's a new student - the one with the superiority complex - and Smith doesn't make her a one-dimensional villain. She's insecure. She's performing wealth and status because she doesn't know another way to connect. I've had that student. I've had twenty versions of that student.
Then there's the girl whose academic diligence "mars her socially," and let me tell you, that phrase from the description hit me like a freight train. Because Smith understood something a lot of contemporary YA still fumbles: the social cost of being visibly smart in a school culture that rewards likability over intellect. She wrote about it without preaching. She just showed it happening, showed how the other girls pulled away, showed how achievement became isolation. My students would hate this. I love it.
The strangest thread - and the one that fascinated me most as a teacher - is this tradition of "affectionate favouritism" between freshmen and seniors. It's essentially a mentorship system gone sideways, where the emotional entanglements become disruptive to the whole school. Smith is writing about institutional culture and how well-meaning traditions calcify into something coercive. In 1916. Before anyone had the vocabulary for it.
The LibriVox Question
Let's be honest about what you're getting here. LibriVox recordings are volunteer-produced, and this one features multiple readers with varying levels of experience. There's no single narrator carrying you through with consistent characterization - it's a chapter-by-chapter handoff. Some readers are warm and measured, clearly comfortable with the period language. Others are stiffer, reading rather than performing. The audio quality shifts between chapters too - different microphones, different room acoustics. You'll hear it.
This isn't a deal-breaker, but it does change the experience. You're not getting a professional performance where the narrator becomes invisible. You're getting something closer to a community read-aloud, which has its own charm if you're in the right headspace for it. I found myself adjusting to each new voice like switching between different teachers in a hallway - a little jarring, then fine. But if inconsistent narration drives you up the wall, be warned.
The prose itself is period-appropriate - formal by today's standards, with long sentences that trust the reader to keep up. At 5 hours and 15 minutes, it's a manageable listen. Smith doesn't pad. The dialogue moves, the social dynamics shift chapter to chapter, and she resolves things without tying everything into a neat bow. (Denise, who overheard chunks of this on our walk, said the superiority-complex girl reminded her of a parent from last year's open house. She's not wrong.)
Who This Is Actually For
If you're interested in early 20th-century girls' fiction as a genre - not as nostalgia, but as a lens into how we've always been navigating the same social machinery in schools - this is worth your time. If you loved Gene Stratton-Porter or Jean Webster's Daddy-Long-Legs, this is their quieter, more psychologically grounded cousin. The social machinery here reminded me of something I noticed reading Brown Girl Dreaming - that same precise attention to how young women learn to read the unspoken rules of a world that wasn't entirely built for them. If you loved Anne of Green Gables, this is its spiritual successor in the sense of female friendship navigating institutional pressures, minus the romanticism.
If you need polished production, this isn't it. If you need fast plotting, this isn't it either. But if you want to hear a former teacher write honestly about the ecosystem of a girls' school in 1916 - the petty dramas and genuine moral crises and the way teenagers form allegiances like tiny warring nations - and you're willing to accept the LibriVox format for what it is?
Worth pausing the faculty meeting for. (Sorry, Principal Martinez.)
The Annotation I'd Leave in the Margin
Smith stopped teaching because a publisher told her she should write full-time. She went on to continue Eleanor Porter's Pollyanna series after Porter died. But this book - this small, specific, unfashionable school novel - feels more alive to me than anything written to order. The prose deserves to be savored, even through imperfect narration. Especially through imperfect narration. Because the story underneath is real. A teacher wrote it, and a teacher recognized it, a hundred and nine years later, walking along Lake Michigan in the fog.
