How Dear to My Heart

Emily Kimbrough is the co-author, with Cornelia Otis Skinner, of the classic, OUR HEARTS WERE YOUNG AND GAY. On her own, she was a prolific author, and I wish that her publishers would re-issue more of her books. HOW DEAR TO MY HEART is a 1991 re-issue, underwritten by the Delaware County Historic Society, of her reminiscence of her earliest childhood in Muncie, Indiana at the turn of the 20th century. The original printing was in 1944. As always, Ms. Kimbrough's writing is lyrical, and one easily can imagine through her those defining years for our nation, a moment when electricity and automobiles first were entering everyday life, and the telephone still was in the experimental stages. Ms. Kimbrough's vivid style makes that moment understandable, and she remembers her childhood, the places and the people, with great affection. Like all children, she assumed that her realities were the only ones, but the truth is that she grew up in one of the most prominent and affluent families in a small town and, as such, her upbringing was that of an American princess. Still, her family's excellent values shine through, as they do in all her books, and she demonstrates a slice of life that never again will be recaptured. Christmas in Muncie in 1905 is somewhere between Dickens and IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, and it makes for marvelous reading. Consistent with all of her other books, there are plenty of funny anecdotes interspersed with studies of the characters in her life, her paternal grandfather and maternal grandmother (and that grandmother's next-door neighbor, President Benjamin Harrison) and her nanny, the daughter of former slaves. The charming drawings add to the overall feeling of the book. I believe that the same artist also did the illustrations for the early Betsy-Tacy books by Maud Hart Lovelace; essentially, these stories are about similar little girls in similar towns. Maud's girls are fictionalized and Emily's story is her own, but the spirit of both their styles are much the same. This is a wonderful book.