385, 20 pp. 8vo. Annie Fellows Johnston wrote numerous popular children’s and juvenile novels, beginning in the 1890s and continuing until her death in 1931. Her works were huge bestsellers, with millions of copies purchased worldwide. They were translated into dozens of languages. Johnston remains best known for her semi-biographical "Little Colonel" series 13 novels dealing with the aristocracy of old Kentucky. The protagonist, a little girl, is called "the little Colonel" because of her unusually forceful personality at the age of 5. She seems to emulate her grandfather, a former colonel in the Confederacy. Several times, Johnston made plans to end the series -- once after The Little Colonel’s House Party, again after The Little Colonel’s Knight Comes Riding - but the general reading public demanded more. Her last work, The Little Colonel Stories, Part 2, was published just months before her death. The auto-and biographical nature of her fiction provides a unique perspective of the lifestyle and thought of the Victorian and post-Victorian era within the American heartland. Johnston also believed in education, which certainly comes across in her novels, with particular stress on the education of women and girls. The first book in the series, The Little Colonel, was released in 1895, and made into a film of the same name starring a young Shirley Temple in 1935.
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