Fabuly is a free audiobook app that enables you to access thousands of classic novels and short stories as ebooks or audiobooks. We also have an immersive mode that enables you to read while listening at the same time.
🎧
Audiobook Available
Listen to Understood Betsy in the app. It's free and ad-free.
About this book
Shy, delicate Elizabeth Ann has always been told she can’t do anything on her own—until a twist of fate sends her to a Vermont farm where no one coddles her, and no one tells her who she is. In this new world of muddy boots, morning chores, and unexpected freedom, she begins to discover something surprising: herself.
Author
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Read by
Lee Ann Howlett
Story
CHAPTER I AUNT HARRIET HAS A COUGH
Understood Betsy
By Dorothy Canfield
CHAPTER I
AUNT HARRIET HAS A COUGH
When this story begins, Elizabeth Ann, who is the heroine of it, was a little girl of nine, who lived with her Great-aunt Harriet in a medium-sized city in a medium-sized State in the middle of this country; and that’s all you need to know about the place, for it’s not the important thing in the story; and anyhow you know all about it because it was probably very much like the place you live in yourself.
Elizabeth Ann’s Great-aunt Harriet was a widow who was not very rich or very poor, and she had one daughter, Frances, who gave piano lessons to little girls. They kept a “girl” whose name was Grace and who had asthma dreadfully and wasn’t very much of a “girl” at all, being nearer fifty than forty. Aunt Harriet, who was very tender-hearted, kept her chiefly because she couldn’t get any other place on account of her coughing so you could hear her all over the house.
So now you know the names of all the household. And this is how they looked: Aunt Harriet was very small and thin and old, Grace was very small and thin and middle-aged, Aunt Frances (for Elizabeth Ann called her “Aunt,” although she was really, of course, a first-cousin-once-removed) was small and thin and if the light wasn’t too strong might be called young, and Elizabeth Ann was very small and thin and little. And yet they all had plenty to eat. I wonder what was the matter with them?
It was certainly not because they were not good, for no womenkind in all the world had kinder hearts than they. You have heard how Aunt Harriet kept Grace (in spite of the fact that she was a very depressing person) on account of her asthma; and when Elizabeth Ann’s father and mother both died when she was a baby, although there were many other cousins and uncles and aunts in the family, these two women fairly rushed upon the little baby-orphan, taking her home and surrounding her henceforth with the most loving devotion.
They ...
Section 1 of 11 sections
🎧
Audiobook Available
Listen to Understood Betsy in the app. It's free and ad-free.
About this book
Shy, delicate Elizabeth Ann has always been told she can’t do anything on her own—until a twist of fate sends her to a Vermont farm where no one coddles her, and no one tells her who she is. In this new world of muddy boots, morning chores, and unexpected freedom, she begins to discover something surprising: herself.
Author
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Read by
Lee Ann Howlett
Story
CHAPTER I AUNT HARRIET HAS A COUGH
Understood Betsy
By Dorothy Canfield
CHAPTER I
AUNT HARRIET HAS A COUGH
When this story begins, Elizabeth Ann, who is the heroine of it, was a little girl of nine, who lived with her Great-aunt Harriet in a medium-sized city in a medium-sized State in the middle of this country; and that’s all you need to know about the place, for it’s not the important thing in the story; and anyhow you know all about it because it was probably very much like the place you live in yourself.
Elizabeth Ann’s Great-aunt Harriet was a widow who was not very rich or very poor, and she had one daughter, Frances, who gave piano lessons to little girls. They kept a “girl” whose name was Grace and who had asthma dreadfully and wasn’t very much of a “girl” at all, being nearer fifty than forty. Aunt Harriet, who was very tender-hearted, kept her chiefly because she couldn’t get any other place on account of her coughing so you could hear her all over the house.
So now you know the names of all the household. And this is how they looked: Aunt Harriet was very small and thin and old, Grace was very small and thin and middle-aged, Aunt Frances (for Elizabeth Ann called her “Aunt,” although she was really, of course, a first-cousin-once-removed) was small and thin and if the light wasn’t too strong might be called young, and Elizabeth Ann was very small and thin and little. And yet they all had plenty to eat. I wonder what was the matter with them?
It was certainly not because they were not good, for no womenkind in all the world had kinder hearts than they. You have heard how Aunt Harriet kept Grace (in spite of the fact that she was a very depressing person) on account of her asthma; and when Elizabeth Ann’s father and mother both died when she was a baby, although there were many other cousins and uncles and aunts in the family, these two women fairly rushed upon the little baby-orphan, taking her home and surrounding her henceforth with the most loving devotion.
They ...
Section 1 of 11 sections
