Quindlen’s talk, titled “Betsy Ray, Feminist Icon,” explained her fondness for the fictional heroine and her family by asking: “They are Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and Maud Hart Lovelace.” “There are three authors whose body of work I have reread more than once in my adult life,” Quindlen said at a meeting of the Betsy-Tacy Society in St. HarperCollins is reissuing the entire series in paperback due to what editors call “moderate public demand.” The books have also inspired a national newsletter with 1,000 subscribers, a national Betsy-Tacy Society, a fund-raising effort to maintain the homes in Mankato where Betsy’s and Tacy’s real-life counterparts lived, a Betsy-Tacy chat line on the Internet and a plethora of commercial Betsy-Tacy-styled items (from lithographs and pewter figurines to cookbooks). How odd, then, that the Betsy-Tacy books have become a kind of cult treasure among thousands who have read them, including such disparate sorts as singer / actress Bette Midler and Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen. Lovelace earned enough from her books to support an easy, if modest, lifestyle with her husband in their later years-but she never became really rich or famous. Although Betsy-Tacy (as aficionados call the series) has never been totally out of print since the first book was published in 1940, neither has it become a household name.
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