Authors and Books
for Children

Betty Cavanna: For Girls Going on Sixteen

In dozens of ultimately reassuring books for adolescent girls, Betty Cavanna explored teenage dreams and the conflicts of growing up female; though the books seem somewhat quaint and stereotypical today, their simple themes are universal.

Elizabeth Allen Cavanna was born in Camden, New Jersey, on June 24, 1909, and grew up in Haddonfield, New Jersey. As a child, she was stricken with infantile paralysis (many years later, she wrote about a young girl with polio in her book Joyride, 1974). She developed her love for books and reading during her convalescence and recovery; she particularly enjoyed the stories of Hans Christian Andersen and Beatrix Potter.

From 1925 to 1929, she attended Douglass College in New Brunswick, New Jersey, now part of Rutgers State University. A journalism major, she reported college items for the New Brunswick Home News. After graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1929, she worked two years as a reporter and social editor for the Bayonne Times, a daily newspaper. In 1931 she joined Westminster Press in Philadelphia as an advertising manager; she stayed with Westminster for ten years, eventually becoming art director. During this time she married Edward Talman Headley and began writing short stories in her spare time; she turned to full-time writing in 1941.


Puppy Stakes, her first book, was published by Westminster in 1943; several of Betty Cavanna's books featured dogs and horses, including The Black Spaniel Mystery (1944), Spurs for Suzanna (1946), Banner Year (1987), Wanted: A Girl for the Horses (1984), and her classic Going on Sixteen (1945). She also wrote the Diane series of books, as Elizabeth Headley.

In 1948, using the pseudonym Betsy Allen (Allen was her middle name and her mother's maiden name), she began the Connie Blair mystery series, drawing on her own advertising background. A young career girl at an advertising agency, Connie encounters and solves mysteries, often in romantic settings such as Bermuda; the Caribbean; Newport, Rhode Island; and Mexico. The series lasted ten years and comprised twelve books. (For more about the Connie Blair series, see Connie Blair: The Quest for a Colorful Career.)

After her first husband died in 1952, Cavanna in 1957 married George Russell Harrison, then a dean at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and moved to Concord, Massachusetts, a setting she used in her historical novel Ruffles and Drums (1975). Among her other historical fiction were A Touch of Magic (1961), also with a Revolutionary War setting, and Runaway Voyage (1978), based on the true story of the so-called Mercer Maids, young women recruited by Asa Mercer to journey from New England to Seattle, where men outnumbered women nine to one.

Until his death in 1979, she and her husband traveled extensively; in the 1960s they collaborated (Cavanna provided the text and Harrison the photographs) on the Around the World Today series, a twelve-book nonfiction series, each book focusing on an individual child in a foreign land (for example, Arne of Norway, Pepe of Argentina, Doug of Australia). Also in the 1960s Cavanna wrote other nonfiction guides to various subjects (for example, The First Book of Seashells, The First Book of Wool, The First Book of Morocco).

Her travels provided background materials for many of her juvenile novels, including some of her most notable stories: Japan for Jenny Kimura (1964), Grenada for The Spice Island Mystery (1969), and Ireland for The Ghost of Ballyhooly (1971). Both The Spice Island Mystery and The Ghost of Ballyhooly were nominated for the Mystery Writers of America Edgar award.

In her later years Betty Cavanna divided her time between homes in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania; she spent her last two years living in France, where she died in Vezelay on August 13, 2001. Her books are still remembered fondly by a generation of readers who saw themselves and their problems in her realistic, nonmelodramatic stories.