The Prospering - Elizabeth George Speare

Google a search on Elizabeth George Speare and you will get a nice bio and a list of New bery Award winners and honor books that she wrote between 1957 and 1984. Her novels for young adult readers were the stuff of history that I grew up on - Calico Captive, The Bronze Bow, The Sign of the Beaver, and The Witch of Blackbird Pond were all classics of historical fiction. Yet, nowhere in that biography will you find note of her novel for adults called The Prospering.

 

 

The Prospering is a fictionalized (albeit incredibly well-researched) novel that revolves around the grand experiment undertaken by the Massachusetts settlers to convert the native peoples.

 

Finding A Literary Niche ... Belva Plain

Women stay home to raise children all the time. They choose family over career or they put their careers on the back burner while they raise their familes, hoping to pick 'it' back up when they feel their children are on an even keel and they can place their concentration back in the working world outside the home. Belva Plain managed to combine both worlds. She married after having graduated from Barnard College.  During her early married life, she wrote short stories that were published in the likes of Cosmopolitan and other women's magazines. As her children grew older, she found time to begin work on a novel, using her degree in history to weave an historical novel that began during the late 1890's and ended in the 1950's. Once it was published, she was on her way. She had a very devoted fan base that followed her career over the course of thirty years, from the time that that first novel, Evergreen was published in 1978 to her final novel, Heartwood, published (posthumously) in 2011.