When Frances announces she is to be married and has come to "save" Elizabeth Ann from the dreaded Putney cousins, she is amazed to discover that the little girl is quite content to stay. The child thrives in her new environment, learning to make butter, boil maple syrup, and tend the animals. In her new rural life, Elizabeth Ann comes to be nicknamed "Betsy," and to find that many activities that Frances had always thought too demanding for a little girl are considered, by the Putney family, ordinary expectations for a child: walking to school alone, cooking, and having household duties to perform. The story tells of Elizabeth Ann, a 9-year-old orphan who goes from a sheltered existence with her father's aunt Harriet and cousin Frances in the city, to living on a Vermont farm with her mother's family, the Putneys, whose child-rearing practices had always seemed suspect to Harriet and her daughter. Understood Betsy is a 1916 novel for children by Dorothy Canfield Fisher. The matter was that never before had she known what she was doing in school.LibriVox recording of Understood Betsy, by Dorothy Canfield Fisher. This time Elizabeth Ann didn't answer, because she herself didn't know what the matter was. 'What's the matter?' asked the teacher again. 'Well, for goodness' sakes!' ejaculated Elizabeth Ann, feeling very much as though somebody had stood her suddenly on her head. You're just yourself, aren't you? What difference does it make what grade you're in? And what's the use of your reading little baby things too easy for you just because you don't know your multiplication table?' 'You aren't any grade at all, no matter where you are in school. If I'm second-grade arithmetic and seventh-grade reading and third-grade spelling, what grade am I?' 'Why-why,' said Elizabeth Ann, 'I don't know what I am at all. 'What's the matter?' asked the teacher, seeing her bewildered face.
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