Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
1903
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
1903
The story of Rebecca begins on a stagecoach, a ten-year-old leaving everything she knows for a life with strangers. Her father is dead, the farm is lost to debt, and her mother has made the painful choice to send her daughter to live with spinster aunts in the rural town of Riverboro, Maine. What follows is neither a tragedy nor a simple pastoral idyll. It is the portrait of a girl whose imagination is both her salvation and her constant trouble. Rebecca arrives at her aunts' farm to find Aunt Miranda, sharp-tongued and exacting, and Aunt Jane, gentle and yearning for affection. Over seven years, Rebecca transforms their quiet world with her daydreams of India and Paris, her imaginary gardens, and her scrapes both funny and painful. She fibs, she stumbles, she embarrasses herself. But she never loses her essential sunshine, her refusal to let hardship curdle into bitterness. The novel endures because it captures something true about childhood: the way imagination can transform poverty into adventure, and the way one small, fiery girl can slowly thaw a household frozen by loneliness and regret. It is for anyone who remembers being ten years old and certain that somewhere, somehow, something wonderful was waiting.
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“The soul grows into lovely habits as easily as into ugly ones, and the moment a life begins to blossom into beautiful words and deeds, that moment a new standard of conduct is established, and your eager neighbors look to you for a continuous manifestation of the good cheer, the sympathy, the ready wit, the comradeship, or the inspiration, you once showed yourself capable of. Bear figs for a season or two, and the world outside the orchard is very unwilling you should bear thistles.””
— Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
“Miranda Sawyer had a heart, of course, but she had never used it for any other purpose than the pumping and circulating of blood.””
— Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
“There are certain narrow, umimaginative, and autocratic old people who seem to call out the most mischievous and sometimes the worst traits in children.””
— Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
“Great, wide, beautiful, wonderful World,With the wonderful water round you curled,And the wonderful grass upon your breast,World, you are beautifully drest!””
— Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
“It would be false to say that one could ever be alone when one has one's lovely thoughts to comfort one.””
— Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
“Look at the pebbles in the bottom of the pool, Miss Emily, so round and smooth and shining." "Yes, but where did they get that beautiful polish, that satin skin, that lovely shape, Rebecca? Not in the still pool lying on the sands. It was never there that their angles were rubbed off and their rough surfaces polished, but in the strife and warfare of running waters. They have jostled against other pebbles, dashed against sharp rocks, and now we look at them and call them beautiful.””
— Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
“The girl's eyes were soft and tender and the heart within her stretched a little and grew; grew in sweetness and intuition and depth of feeling. It had looked into another heart, felt it beat, and heard it sigh; and that is how all hearts grow.””
— Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
“Why, mother!" cried Rebecca, clasping her knees with her hands; "why, mother, it's enough joy just to be here in the world on a day like this; to have the chance of seeing, feeling, doing, becoming! When you were seventeen, mother, wasn't it good just to be alive? You haven't forgotten?””
— Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
“The brimming glass that overflows its own rim moistens the earth about it.””
— Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
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<a href="https://lex-books.com/book/rebecca-of-sunnybrook-farm-4c555f21-302e-4489-bf13-edb4ac42765b"><img src="https://lex-books.com/badges/read-on-lex.svg" alt="Read Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm by Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin free on Lex" width="160" height="40"></a>[](https://lex-books.com/book/rebecca-of-sunnybrook-farm-4c555f21-302e-4489-bf13-edb4ac42765b)[url=https://lex-books.com/book/rebecca-of-sunnybrook-farm-4c555f21-302e-4489-bf13-edb4ac42765b][img]https://lex-books.com/badges/read-on-lex.svg[/img][/url]Read Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm by Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin free on Lex: https://lex-books.com/book/rebecca-of-sunnybrook-farm-4c555f21-302e-4489-bf13-edb4ac42765bCite this book
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Wiggin, Kate Douglas Smith. Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Lex, lex-books.com/book/rebecca-of-sunnybrook-farm-4c555f21-302e-4489-bf13-edb4ac42765b.Wiggin, K. D. S. (1903). Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/rebecca-of-sunnybrook-farm-4c555f21-302e-4489-bf13-edb4ac42765bWiggin, Kate Douglas Smith. Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/rebecca-of-sunnybrook-farm-4c555f21-302e-4489-bf13-edb4ac42765b.
