A Terrible Tomboy

At Gorswen Abbey, Peggy Vaughan is trouble with boots on. She climbs trees, rides pony bareback, and refuses to sit still long enough to learn needlework. When her cousin Lilian arrives expecting a proper young lady, she finds instead a girl who treats the abbey grounds as her personal kingdom, scaling walls, raiding the orchard, vanishing for hours into the countryside. Peggy's father, a gentleman-farmer, and her kind Aunt Helen must wrangle a daughter who chafes against every expectation of how girls should behave. She isn't naughty exactly, she's simply built for adventure in a world that keeps telling her to sit primly and sew. Her mischief is reckless, her spirit unbroken, and her heart always in the right place. This is the tomboy's own story from 1904, when girls who climbed trees were considered almost scandalous, and the small rebellions that shaped childhoods before the modern age.