The Hart family home was pretty, but not luxurious. “Back in Mankato I wrote stories in notebooks and illustrated them with pictures cut from magazines.” “I cannot remember back to a year in which I did not consider myself to be a writer,” she recalled decades later. From an early age, she was set on a literary career. Her family moved into the house on Center Street a few months after her birth and stayed there until 1906. Both houses give you the opportunity to experience the real-life setting of a uniquely appealing fictional world. Both the Hart and Kenney homes have been restored and opened for tours by the Mankato-based Betsy-Tacy Society. Their parents, siblings, and friends all appear-under different names-in the books. There was a real Betsy (Lovelace, originally Hart) and a real Tacy (her friend Frances “Bick” Kenney). What not all Betsy-Tacy readers may realize is that Lovelace drew the Deep Valley stories from her own life in Mankato, a small city about 90 miles south of Minneapolis.

Along the way are birthday parties, adventurous excursions up The Big Hill behind Betsy’s house and to the Opera House downtown, elementary and high school, and, eventually, Betsy’s efforts to find true love and begin a writing career. Starting with two small girls in the 1890s, the series follows Betsy and Tacy into young adulthood. Real-Life Setting of a Most Popular Fictional Worldīlume is not alone: nearly 80 years after Lovelace published her first Betsy-Tacy book, the stories of the two devoted friends and their families remain among the most charming and evocative portraits of childhood in American literature.

Betsy tacy novel