Elizabeth George Speare

I've never been able to sympathize when friends tell me they don't like to learn about history. In fact, I find history pretty darned interesting, and I think part of the reason is because I started reading historical fiction when I was 11 or 12.

One writer who was key in developing my interest was Elizabeth George Speare. Winner of two Newbery medals, her best-known book these days is probably The Witch of Blackbird Pond, but two others that I have long loved are Calico Captive and The Bronze Bow.

I just reread all three books, and still found them inspiring to read.


Captive was published first (1957), and takes place in the 1750s in New Hampshire and Montreal. Shown here are the original, 1989, and most recent covers. It's interesting how the first cover focuses on a Montreal scene (which relates to the majority of the book) while the more recent covers focus on the relatively short period of Miriam's family's captivity.

Witch, written in 1958, is set about 70 years earlier in Connecticut.


The original cover was moody and classy. The unfortunate 1970s paperback (which was the first copy I owned!) was obviously going for a romance novel aesthetic (complete with a breasty, loose-haired, blond Kit!), and the current cover, while more staid, is not really much better.

Bow, which appeared in 1961, occurs long before the others, and is set in Palestine around 30 A.D. Its original cover is in a mid-20th-century commercial illustration style, but is quite accurate in terms of rendering a key scene in the book. The recent paperback cover, done for the book's 45th anniversary, is an interesting folk art portrait of the main character. I don't know how historically accurate it is in terms of style, but at least it's attractive.

Unlike most of the books I read in my youth, the majority of Speare's books had a female main character. Kit in Witch and Miriam in Captive are strong focal points who move from a selfish, narrow world view to a broader, more mature one. In Miriam's case, her world view also changes about the "savage" Indians. Daniel, the main character in Bow, undergoes similar growth as he finally gives up his quest for revenge against the Romans. All three come to respect the complexity of family relations and the interconnectedness of community.

Speare's depictions of the places are memorable: Bustling Montreal before the English conquest, dreary-then-vivid Connecticut as seen through the eyes of the Barbados-born Kit, and the sweltering villages and towns of Palestine all come to life.

Of course, each of these books has a gentle romantic edge, which appealed to my adolescent heart, I'm sure. True love exists in these stories, once the main character has matured enough to recognize it.

Elizabeth George Speare wrote these three books in very quick succession once her children had reached junior high school. After that, her output dropped for several decades, resulting in two books of little notoriety. Then in 1984 The Sign of the Beaver came out, and also was named a Newbery honor book. By then I was an adult, though, and didn't read it (I did check it out a few years ago, but didn't find it too compelling). I wonder what happened during that 20+ year period that decreased her early prolificness? Writer's block, or just too busy living her life?

Speare died in 1994 at the age of 85. The New York Times obituary (which contains several errors, by the way!) quoted her as saying:

I have chosen to write historical novels, chiefly, I think, because I enjoy sharing with young people my own ever-fresh astonishment at finding that men and women and boys and girls who lived through the great events of the past were exactly like ourselves, and that they faced every day the same choices, large and small, which daily confront us.

That sounds like exactly what I took from her stories.