The Heroine's Bookshelf: Life Lessons, from Jane Austen to Laura Ingalls Wilder

able to scrape together enough for long summer trips to a beach cottage, but the girls had to stay there alone as she commuted back to odd jobs in the city. They concealed their misery from Betty, just as she hid hers from them. They had no way of knowing that she worried about them every waking moment, every second that her unrelenting scramble for enough money to survive kept her from them. The Great Depression had come, tearing strong families apart and leaving unprecedented poverty in its wake. But for Betty, this tumultuous era was a vehicle for career success. She had always had an affinity for the underdog, the poor man: now she would be paid to write about him. When federal arts jobs got funding, she was first in line at the employment office.

Betty quickly found her way to the job of her dreams, moving to North Carolina to pursue a federal theater project that sought to bring seasoned artistic professionals to the South. Was she following her literary ambitions or attempting to reconstruct the perfect family? Both: Bob Finch came with Betty to North Carolina.

To Betty and her girls, Chapel Hill was like another world, a place far removed from the gritty, ugly streets of New York. Like the tree she would write about a few years later, Betty was quick to take root. She settled into a small apartment with the girls, befriending the community’s most beloved citizens and writing plays as quickly as her ramshackle Smith-Corona could type them. But her financial troubles persisted. The $60 a month George sent for the girls was supplemented by the odd story sale or writing award, but it still wasn’t always enough for things like clothing and heat. Now that her daughters were in high school, Betty drew upon her own distant relationship with her mother and allowed them significant freedom. In later years she would learn that this sudden change in attitude had confused her daughters, who longed for their mother’s approval and love.

But Betty had other worries. Her ties to Bob had flourished along with her writing, and at first the house had been busy with the impassioned collaboration of two lovers. Bob visited often, filling the house with cheer and humor, but his alcoholism and his constant infidelity wore on Betty. In order to cling to the people she loved, she was constantly called upon to let them go. At one point in the late 1930s she had to ship Mary and Nancy back to their father in Connecticut because she simply didn’t have enough money to make ends meet. She herself could subsist on next to nothing, but the girls couldn’t. They wanted to lead normal lives. George grumbled about Betty’s failure to provide for her daughters; she, too, worried constantly about her inability to keep her family together. Still she persisted in her writing, sending the girls off to their father during the summers and even using money her daughters found on the ground to buy food for the family.

All along, something inside her compelled her to keep on writing. After making sure the girls had the bare essentials, Betty always turned back to the work that had become all-consuming: an autobiographical novel about her childhood. It took a lot to revisit Brooklyn in her mind, to return to that harsh place where families crowded three or even four generations into the same small apartment, a place rampant with disease, crime, and despair. As she started to spin the story of a skinny, dreamy girl and her hardened mother, she didn’t realize she had begun to exorcize childhood demons and communicate with her own daughters. The work that had kept Betty separate from her children’s lives for so long was now a conduit of sorts. She wrote while the girls were at school, leaving that day’s production in a box next to her desk. As soon as they returned home, her daughters would snatch up the typewritten pages and read more about Francie Nolan and her Brooklyn neighborhood. In its way, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was Betty’s gift to them, and to herself.

It’s not an easy book to describe or even to read. Grim, even desperate in parts, it takes a steady look at what it’s like to be a child whose existence depends on an undependable family in an unbearable state of poverty and want. Like Betty, Francie is obsessed with her dangerously incapable father and repulsed by her make-do mother. Betty’s many struggles with love and duty smash into one another in the form of Katie Nolan, a mother who ruins her once-beautiful hands and almost murders a man who would harm a daughter whose brother she favors, whose education she sacrifices to family finances, and whose success she painfully doubts. The book’s conflict between mother and child is unsettling and wildly sad. It’s also unflinching and real for any woman who has crossed the bridge between childhood and the adult world.

There are many heroines to be had in Francie’s Brooklyn, for again and again it is women who form an almost impenetrable circle of support and competence around the lives of their children and husbands. Betty writes her heroines as enemies and saviors at once; her women go through the motions even when the men in their lives are hurt, sick, tired, and incapacitated by drink. They starve for their children’s sakes, making a pathetic game out of poverty and starvation, whispering their secrets to one another in the few stolen moments of leisure they somehow manage to wring out of their lives. For Smith, a mother’s role is more than that of protector. She’s the creator and the destroyer of an entire world.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’s family ties are about inheritance, the ways in which people obtain weaknesses and peculiarities and beauty just by being born. Tied to each other by bonds they can’t explain or even see, Francie’s family is as much the head on the table, devastated by the weight of grief, as it is the brother and sister sticking together beneath a brutal neighborhood tradition and a crushing Christmas tree. As Francie loves and hates and fights for self-definition, she often finds that her family is all that stands between her and starvation, abuse, and death.

Luckily for us, Betty Smith doesn’t just do blood relations. No, she also gives Francie a chosen family in addition to the one she’s born into, a group of kids who clog up Brooklyn’s porches and stoops, girls who prepare themselves for their lovers, and shopkeepers whose harassment is as much a part of childhood as Santa Claus. Extended and nontraditional families are just as important as the ones Betty’s characters are bonded to genetically. The gentle, golden-hearted aunt whose actions threaten the social order but whose arms are full of love joins a standoffish librarian and gossiping factory workers as people who affect Francie just as much as Johnny Nolan’s sidewise singing or Katie’s rough-handed attempt at motherly affection. And as she learns to love books, Francie does what we do: assembles an even wider family of fictional characters, using books to help her escape and survive her own family life.

For Betty and Francie, there’s nothing clean or simple about family ties. But their very messiness is what makes them so real. When Katie kicks out her sister Sissy for humiliating the family, we can’t wait for her to soften and take Sissy back into the fold. The forces that cause a family to stray and fall apart are just as compelling as the ones that glue it back together again.

No matter how terrible the circumstances or crushing the poverty she must endure, Francie sticks to her family identity. It is, after all, the thing that brought her life. It’s the thing that keeps her going even when her mother must pretend they are on a polar expedition to help them get through days without any food. It’s the thing to which she clings when her teacher tells her to burn the stories she has penned about her father’s alcoholism and the “sordid” neighborhood in which she lives:

Francie went to the big dictionary and looked up the word. Sordid. Filthy. Filthy? She thought of her father wearing a fresh dicky and collar every day of his life and shining his worn shoes as often as twice a day…. Also mean and low. She remembered a hundred and one little tendernesses and acts of thoughtfulness on the part of her father. She remembered how everyone had loved him so. Her face got hot. She couldn’t see the next words because the page turned red under her eyes. She turned on Miss Garnder, her face twisted with fury.

“Don’t you ever use that word about us!”

When Francie burns the flowery essays she composed to please her teacher, the fantasies she has spun instead of facing the truth about her family, she is doing more than heating up the apartment: she’s exorcising herself of other people’s opinions of her family. It’s a declaration of her family’s worth and importance, even in a world that has no use for single mothers or drunken fathers. Francie pays the price in the short term—she falls out of favor with her teacher and loses the academic credit that has meant so much to her—but it’s a sacrifice she’s more than willing to make for the Nolan family name, even if nobody ever finds out.

Throughout it all, Francie bears witness to a family life that’s scarred with tragedy and veined through with fun. Favoritism, alcoholism, and endless poverty threaten to destroy the family unit, but in the end, they only manage to capsize Francie’s childhood. Like it or not, Francie is a Nolan, and it’s not for nothing that Betty constantly points out the ways in which her heroine combines the hardness of her mother and the weakness of her father, the steeliness of the Rommely women and the dreaminess of the Nolans. A peek into Francie’s family hurts and obligations seems to reveal Betty, confused and rebellious about her own unbreakable affinities, working out the tangled skein of her own lineage on the page.

It is exactly these inheritances that challenge a heroine tasked with understanding her family’s particular