I loved stories about miraculous recoveries, though not all the fictional children were pupils of God’s School of Pain. Invalid Clara manages without her wheelchair by breathing in God’s good air up in the mountains in Johanna Spyri’s Heidi. Colin is pushed in his wheelchair into the Secret Garden and soon Nature is working magic and helping him walk in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic. But now I feel these miracles are unlikely, to say the least, and the plotlines seem slightly offensive. It implies that being able to walk again requires extreme piety, strength of will, and an outdoor life – frustrating ideas for any child with a disability.

The modern Katy in my own version has a serious accident, injures her spine, and has to deal with the fact that she won’t walk again, no matter how good she is. She is in despair, naturally enough, and feels her life is over – but after a while she finds the courage to go back to school. She isn’t meek and patient and resigned. She finds it’s more beneficial if she’s fierce and determined. Obviously her life won’t ever be the same again, but she has a new, different life, and she can still be sporty and popular and successful.

The nineteenth century was a different world, where girls were expected to be the little angels of the house, disabled or not. I think the saintly invalid, Katy, loses a lot of her sparky personality, but her transformation doesn’t happen all at once. Susan Coolidge is too good and perceptive a writer to have Katy change her attitudes in a few weeks. She finds her second winter as an invalid harder than the first.

It is often so with sick people. There is a sort of excitement in being ill which helps along just at the beginning. But as months go on, and everything grows an old story, and day follows another day, all just alike, and all tiresome, courage is apt to flag and spirits to grow dull.

Katy has to wait another two years before she suddenly finds she can walk again. To be fair, when Katy has her accident her doctors say that they think the injury to her spine is one she will eventually overcome because she’s young and strong, so it’s not necessarily a miraculous recovery.

Cousin Helen sees Katy look after her siblings:

. . . pleasantly and sweetly, without a bit of the dictatorial elder-sister in her manner, and with none of her old, impetuous tone. And, best of all, she saw the change in Katy’s own face: the gentle expression of her eyes, the womanly look, the pleasant voice, the politeness, the tact in advising the others, without seeming to advise.

If readers feel a little disappointed and miss the old, fun-loving, naughty Katy, they can simply turn back to the beginning of the book and read the first half all over again. I can’t think of any other nineteenth-century book that portrays children so vividly, with sympathy yet no sentimentality at all. Even though Susan Coolidge was asked to copy Little Women, I think What Katy Did is truly original, and the Carr children are just as convincing as the March sisters, if not more so.

I hope this delightful new volume will encourage today’s children to pick it up and become absorbed in Katy’s story – and I’m sure many mature readers will pounce upon it joyfully and rediscover a cherished book of their own childhood.

Contents

1. The Little Carrs

2. Paradise

3. The Day of Scrapes

4. Kikeri

5. In the Loft

6. Intimate Friends

7. Cousin Helen’s Visit

8. To-morrow

9. Dismal Days

10.