The Legacy of Little Stella

The Legacy of Little Stella

EC Hanlon

Little Stella leaned back on her legs like a jackrabbit about to leap forward.

I typed this up and showed it to my sister, Rebecca.

“Over-used simile,” she said, handing me back the laptop, not carefully. “And the phrasing is awkward. Say it simply, ‘She was about to jump.’”

“Was is a passive verb,” I shot back.

“Well thank you, Grandma Barb,” she said breezily. She scratched at the purple sparkle polish on her toes so that it came off in flakes. “It’s like she never died, having you here to point out my grammar foibles.”

“Foibles and mistakes are two different things, Rebecca,” I scolded her. “And you picking on my analogies is no less annoying, and also very Grandma Barb.”

“Very is a lazy word, Anna,” she deadpanned.

I slammed the laptop shut and stood, as though ready to fight Rebecca for real, slapping and hair-pulling, like when we were children.

She remained reclining on the sofa in our office, or the “writing studio” as the family called and had for 100-plus years.

I took a deep yoga breath and then said, “We’re not going to get any work done if we keep bickering.”

“I’m not bickering with you,” she said, emphasizing the word to let me know that she found it an old-fashioned, corny term. “And if you would just admit that I’m right, we could move on.”

I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to force out all annoyance with my little sister through my pores, like sweat.

“Yes, OK,” I said. “The jackrabbit simile was too much. It was cliched. It’s difficult to find an analogy that hasn’t been used before when you’re writing the 80^th installment.”

“You don’t have to keep mentioning that this is the big 8-0 for Little Stella,” Rebecca said. She turned onto her stomach and rested her chin on the arm of the sofa. “I am oh-so-aware of it.”

She yawned and closed her eyes, bathed in fatigue and boredom.

Rebecca never wanted to be a writer. The “family business” caught her young when our mother and Grandma Barb decided which of us would carry on the tradition. It was always the girls. Rebecca had wanted to be a doctor. She’d loved and excelled in biology classes in high school. But the carefully-worded stipulations of her trust fund allowed for higher education only if it benefitted the family legacy – Little Stella. We didn’t need college to teach us to write. We learned that at home in hours-long lessons and daily workshopping sessions to further hone the skills we inherited genetically from our foremothers.

Rebecca’s wishes were beside the point, and I was tired of feeling sorry for her. It was our mutual mission to write this book.

“Rebecca, you need to take this seriously,” I said. “The 80^th book in any series is a big deal. And sales are down. We have to come up with some ideas.”

“I have some ideas,” she muttered.

“I’ve heard your ideas.”

“And you continue to dismiss them.”

I didn’t respond. After a few moments of silence, Rebecca let out a typhoon of a sigh and pulled herself up from the sofa.

“See you at dinner,” she said.

She left the studio, pulling the stained glass doors (circa 1922) behind her carefully, as we had been trained to do since we were toddlers.

Glad that she was gone, I settled back down at the desk with my laptop to try and get some work done. My – our – deadline was less a month away and we’d gotten little more than a title and a basic plot line written.

Little Stella visits Grandma Ruth

The idea was that everyone’s favorite little Bostonian – the incomparable Little Stella – takes the trolley to Cambridge to celebrate her Grandma Ruth’s 80^th birthday (a little tie-in to the volume number).

The problem was that this was not new territory. Little Stella took the trolley in at least two previous adventures. She watched the city lights go by at what seemed “lightning speed” in volume 17. She watched the “silver snake” of the Charles River flow as she passed over it in number 53.

Grandma Barb wrote that metaphor – the silver snake – a crime for which I will never forgive her. Not after she red-penned every poetic comparison I suggested for the first 25 years of my life.

“You’re too wordy,” she told me again and again. “We’re not writing post-modernism. Little Stella is a pillar of classic children’s literature.”

The greatest lesson I learned form Grandma Barb was not to argue.

We had to be respectful of the original Little Stella, as created by my great-grandmother, Bonnie Farnsworth (of the Boylston Street Farnsworths) in 1917. Every book in the series is credited to “Mrs. Bonnie Farnsworth,” so that each of us descendants are referred to as such. Bonnie had Little Stella visit the duck pond and Faneuil Hall and every other Boston landmark in existence at the time. She brought Little Stella through World War One and the Great Depression unscathed and untouched by time. Little Stella never grew up, and never shall. Bonnie’s will made her intentions clear in stark legalese: “All future incarnations of Little Stella shall remain true to the original spirit of the character and no significant alterations shall be made to the same.”

Grandma Barb saw to it that Little Stella remained a wide-eyed innocent with a 19^th Century spirit through the changing world of the 1950s and ‘60s and into the ‘70s. My mother helped keep the character pure even as a new millennium turned over. There was not a drop of modernity in Little Stella’s world. Boston’s landscape remained the same in the pages of our books – brushed out in muted watercolors – while in reality the skyline rose higher yearly. The streets grew dirty and the homeless began to camp on the sidewalks even of Little Stella’s well-to-do neighborhood. Friendly Charlie the Doorman still cheerfully helped Little Stella with the elevator buttons year after year, long after her building – the one we still lived in a century after her creation – deteriorated and lost all sense of gentrification. Little Stella visited each neighbor in the building in one volume or another, and each apartment held a kindly face and freshly baked snickerdoodles. Now, we don’t know a single other occupant by name. We exchange suspicious looks instead of pleasantries.

“People want the world that Little Stella lives in,” Grandma Barb insisted. “They want to recall a better time, the time they had back then.”

Later, in our shared bedroom, Rebecca had mocked Grandma Barb’s anachronistic nostalgia.

“People long for the old days,” she said, “when white men had all the power and girls like Little Stella knew her place.”

“That’s not what she meant,” I said, although I partially agreed with my sister.

“It is exactly what she means. Isn’t it time to bring Little Stella into the 21^st Century?”

“What do you mean, give her an iPhone and a TikTok account? That’s not remaining true to the spirit of the character.”

“Sales are down, Anna. Why do you think that really is?”

I had no answer for that. I knew that modern kids didn’t want to read picture books about watching snowflakes land on the roof of a horse-drawn carriage, like in volume 38. Modern life was flashy and loud. Children’s books reflect reality, or they should.

“Old ladies who grew up with Little Stella buy the books for their grandchildren. It’s the only reason they sell at all. That market will die out, and what will we do when that happens?”

In the writing studio, I looked at the blank document open on my laptop and recalled this conversation. I knew the answer.

Rebecca was right about the books and the reason for the flagging sales. But what could I do? Besides Bonnie’s will, there was also the lifetime of training I’d received. Grandma Barb had drilled into me the proper way to write, and the importance of keeping Little Stella not only alive but pure.

What would we do when people stopped buying the books?

We’d stop writing them.

If we stopped writing them, Mrs. Bonnie Farnsworth would die. And then Anna Farnsworth and Rebecca Farnsworth could be themselves. It might create room for a Dr. Rebecca Farnsworth. It gives me a chance to write whatever metaphors I think work. It opens up a world of opportunity.

Realizing this, I felt like I’d suddenly grown a pair of wings.

I could remain true to Bonnie’s will and Grandma Ruth’s demands. I could set both Rebecca – and myself – free. At that point, it became easy for me to write Little Stella Visits Grandma Ruth.

I tuned back into the document on my laptop. The words came easily and quickly, as though I were channeling Grandma Barb or even Bonnie herself, and simply. I kept the language simple and clear.

I knew it would be my last Little Stella installation.