Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown by Maud Hart Lovelace is the fourth Betsy-Tacy book, set in 1904-05 and published in 1943. The girls are now 12 years old and in the seventh grade.
It is time for Betsy, Tacy and Tib’s world to be expanded in another direction. The trio is now 12. When Downtown opens, Betsy is in her beloved maple tree from which she can see the town of Deep Valley, Minnesota. She sees four places that MHL knows will be important to her (and to us!), “the Opera House, the Melborn Hotel, the skeleton of the new Carnegie Library, and the high school that her sister Julia and Tacy’s sister Katie attended.” She is aware of a world unexplored.
Betsy has one of the notebooks from her father’s shoe store and is working on a dramatic-sounding story, The Repentance of Lady Clinton by Betsy Warrington Ray.* Even before Tacy appears to reveal that her father found their borrowed copy of Lady Audley’s Secret and threw it in the fire.
“He said it was trash.”
“Trash!” cried Betsy. “I’m trying to write books just like it.”
