WHAT KATY DID. A Story

Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1873. Very Scarce First Edition. With illustrations by Addie Ledyard being a charming engraved frontispiece and three engraved plates, also with woodcut initials at the start of each chapter. 8vo, publisher's original royal blue cloth, the upper cover with gilt lettering and a design featuring cattails and grasshoppers in gilt and blind, the spine gilt lettered within elaborate gilt tooling. 274, [2] pp. A very nice copy of this rather scarce first edition, the text is clean and fresh, free of any staining or foxing, the hinges are sound though one of two of the signatures are a bit shaken, the cloth is bright with nice gilt, some rubbing and a few abrasions at the tips and extremities. SCARCE FIRST EDITION OF AN EXTREMELY POPULAR WORK IN ITS TIME, it would be reprinted extensively for decades well into the 20th century. It would also inspire two sequels.
Written by Sarah Chauncey Woolsey under the Coolidge pen name, the story tells of the adventures of a twelve-year-old American girl, Katy Carr, and her family in Ohio in the 1860s. Katy is a tall untidy tomboy, forever getting into scrapes but wishing to be beautiful and beloved. When a terrible accident makes her an invalid, her illness and four-year recovery gradually teach her to be as good and kind as she has always wanted.
Coolidge shared her publisher, Roberts Brothers, with Louisa May Alcott, and WHAT KATY DID helped satisfy the demand for naturalistic novels about girlhood that followed the 1868 success of LITTLE WOMEN. Like Alcott, Coolidge heightened the realism of her novel by drawing on her own childhood memories.
The novel is also an interesting look into injury and infirmary, and societal attitudes towards them, in the later nineteenth century. After her accident, young Katy is given much love and care; but she lives confined in her bedroom, making the best of things and waiting, hoping, to outgrow her injury. She has a wheelchair, but never goes further than her bedroom window. The very idea that she could use it to go out and about into the world, or even just leave her bedroom, is barely even considered.