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Molly Brown of Kentucky — Story, Setting & Ideas

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In Category - Young Readers

Authors: Speed, Nell, 1878-1913 Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2011 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: War stories; World War, 1914-1918 -- Juvenile fiction; Young women -- Social life and customs -- Juvenile fiction; Kentucky -- Social life and customs -- Juvenile fiction; Letter writing -- Juvenile fiction Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

Edition facts

Words 58,625

Reading time 255 min

Text sections 6

This digital edition of Molly Brown of Kentucky — Story, Setting & Ideas is described by source-level measurements including 58,625 words, 4 hr 15 min estimated reading time, and 6 detected text sections.

The text analysis averages about 16.4 words per sentence, while the detected sections provide another way to judge how the source is divided.

Project Gutenberg metadata also associates the work with “War stories,” connecting these edition facts with the source record’s subject description.

Source: Project Gutenberg record #36736

Nell Speed's novel follows Molly Brown and her family through World War I via letters and scenes shifting between Kentucky and France, using epistolary openings, dialect, and domestic settings to frame wartime anxiety and relief.

Editorial Edition Score 4.7/5

★★★★★ ★★★★★

Calculated from edition completeness, EPUB availability, text structure and catalogue metadata. Not a user rating.

How this score is calculated

Description quality20 pts
Title & short description10 pts
Source metadata20 pts
Text length15 pts
Chapters / structure15 pts
EPUB file integrity20 pts

Total of 100 points, scaled to a 2.5-5.0 range. Editions with an empty description or a missing EPUB file are not scored.

Edition quality

File: pg36736

Read the Text

From Miss Julia Kean to Mrs. Edwin Green.

Giverny, France, August, 1914.

Dearest old Molly Brown of Kentucky:

You can marry a million Professor Edwin Greens, B.A., M.A., Ph.D., L.D. (the last stands for lucky dog), and you can also have a million little Green Olive Branches, but you will still be Molly Brown of Kentucky to all of your old friends.

I came up to Giverny last week with the Polly Perkinses. They are great fun and, strange to say, get on rather better than most married folks. Jo is much meeker than we ever thought she could be, now that she has made Polly cut his hair and has let her own grow out. Polly is more manly, too, I think and asserts himself occasionally, much to Jo's delight. I should not be at all astonished if his falsetto voice turned into a baritone, if not a deep bass. He walks with quite a swagger and talks about my wife this and my wife that in such masculine pride that you would not know him.

Paris was rather excited when we came through last week. I have been at Quimperle all summer and only stopped in Paris long enough to get some paints and canvas. I had actually painted out. Jo had written me to join her in this little housekeeping scheme at Giverny. I wish you could see the house we have taken. It is too wonderful that it is ours! Such peace and quiet! Especially so, after the turmoil in Paris. I have seen so few papers that I hardly know what it is all about; no doubt you in Kentucky with your _Courier Journal_ know more than I do. They talk of war, but of course that is nonsense. Anyhow, if there is a war, I bet I am going to be Johnny on the Spot. But of course there won't be one.

I miss Kent,--but I need hardly tell you that. I almost gave in and sailed with him, but it was much best for me to wait in France for my mother and father. They are now in Berlin waiting for the powers that be to give some kind of a permit for some kind of a road that Bobby is to build from Constantinople to the interior; that is, he is to build it if he can get the permission of the Imperial Government. What the Germans have to do with Turkey, you can search me, but that is what Bobby writes me. He has done a lot of work on it already in the way of preliminary plans. I am to hang around until I hear from them, so I am going to hang around with the Polly Perkinses.

No doubt Kent is home by this time. I envy him, somehow. It is so wonderful to have a home to go to. Now isn't that a silly line of talk for Judy Kean to be getting off, I, who have always declared that a Gypsy van was my idea of bliss? I never have had a home and I never have wanted one until lately. I fancy that winter in Paris with your mother in the Rue Brea was my undoing. Of course, if Bobby had been anything but a civil engineer and Mamma had been anything but so much married to Bobby that she had to trot around with him from one end of the earth to the other, why then, I might have had a home. But Bobby is Bobby and he wouldn't have been himself doing anything but building roads, and I certainly would not have had Mamma let him build them all by his lonesome. The truth of the matter is, I was a mistake. I should either never have been born or I should have been born a boy. Geewhillikins! What a boy I would have been! Somehow, I'm glad I'm not, though.

I am wild to see little Mildred. It seems so wonderful for you to be a mother. I know you will make a great job of being one, too. Are you going to have her be an old-fashioned baby with the foregone conclusion that she must "eat her peck of dirt," or is she to be one of these infants whose toys must be sterilized before she is allowed to play with them, and who is too easily contaminated to be kissed unless the kisser gargles first with corrosive sublimate? Please let me know about this, because kiss her I must and will, and if I have to be aseptic before I can do it, I fancy I had better begin right now. Here is Polly with the mail and Paris papers. Will finish later.

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The novel opens not with a narrator but with a letter from Julia Kean to Molly Brown, dated August 1914 from Giverny, France. This epistolary device immediately establishes the transatlantic perspective that structures the story: news of war reaches Kentucky through correspondence, and the reader experiences events filtered through personal voices. The letter’s casual tone—mentioning friends, painting supplies, and a rented house—contrasts sharply with the “turmoil in Paris” it briefly notes, a technique Speed uses throughout to hold domestic life and global conflict in tension.

Letters as Structural Backbone

The table of contents lists chapters titled “A Letter,” “Letters from Paris and Berlin,” and “The American Mail,” signaling that correspondence is not merely a plot device but the novel’s organizing principle. The opening chapter is entirely a letter from Julia to Molly, and later chapters likely contain letters that advance the war plot and character relationships. This epistolary structure allows Speed to shift location without transition: a letter can jump from Giverny to Kentucky to Berlin in a single paragraph. It also creates gaps in knowledge—characters and readers alike wait for news, making the act of reading itself a mirror of wartime waiting.

Dialect and Domestic Voices

Speed renders speech with careful dialect, particularly for the African American servant Caroline. When Molly receives a cablegram, Caroline exclaims, “I bus’ stop ad gall up Zue ad Ad Zarah,” and later “Lawd Gawd a mussy! Is Mr. Kent daid?” This phonetic spelling gives Caroline a distinct vocal presence, but it also risks caricature. The excerpt shows Caroline interpreting events through her own framework—dreams as omens, news as either “scrumptious” or bad—which adds a layer of folk belief to the household’s emotional landscape. Molly’s own voice, by contrast, is rendered in standard English, marking class and education differences even in shared relief.

Movement Between Kentucky and France

The novel’s geography is established early: the first letter is sent from Giverny, France, to Kentucky, and the catalog subjects confirm the story spans both locations. The excerpts show scenes set in Kentucky—Molly’s home, her mother’s bedroom, a telephone call—while the chapter titles promise Paris, Berlin, and a Zeppelin raid. Speed moves between these settings without chapter breaks that announce location; instead, the shift is signaled by the arrival of a letter or cablegram. This technique keeps the war’s distant events pressing into the domestic sphere, as when a phone call about Kent’s safety transforms a quiet breakfast into a scene of weeping and prayer.

Recurring Images of Waiting and Relief

Waiting pervades the excerpts. Mrs. Brown lies in bed, “pretending to eat her breakfast,” while Molly waits by the phone. The cablegram’s arrival triggers a flood of tears and a scramble for handkerchiefs, napkins, and even the dog’s fur. Speed repeats the phrase “safe, well, Kent” as if it were a charm, and the relief is physical: Molly’s knees tremble, her mother’s profile looks “cameo-like.” The dog Shep, with his “greasy expression,” provides a comic counterpoint to the tension. These small, concrete details—cap strings, a breakfast tray, a dog’s damp fur—anchor the emotional climax in the ordinary, making the war’s intrusion felt through domestic disruption.

Readers attentive to structure will notice how Speed uses letters, phone calls, and cablegrams as hinges between scenes, creating a rhythm of anticipation and release. The dialect and domestic details reward close attention to voice and setting, while the war remains a distant but persistent pressure. This edition preserves the original text’s shifts in tone and location, inviting the reader to trace how news travels and how families hold together across an ocean.

Reading about Molly Brown's wartime letters from Kentucky and France, I kept thinking how her quiet courage mirrors what she carries into her freshman year. The same steady voice, the same small kindnesses. That book, Molly Brown's Freshman Days — Themes and Context, holds that gentleness too. It lingers softly, like a familiar room you didn't expect to miss.