A bestseller on Japan: Frances Little

Just finished reading Frances Little's Lady of the Decoration which, as I learned was the number one bestseller in the US for the year of 1907. Wow! It is a fun little book but I would not have thought that it was so popular at one point. Now it does not even get a popularity grade on Amazon.

It was written by Fannie Caldwell using the psedonym Frances Little and it is about a young lady spending several years in Japan operating kindergartens with some American mission. The book consists of her letters to a friend of hers back in the US. She is very homesick, misses a man called Jack who at the end comes to Hiroshima to marry her. This is where the book ends.

Having said that, the book is fun but it would have been nice to have a bit more facts in it. Or at least some names. The heroine, for example, meets a Japanese princess and we do not even learn her name so there is no way of placing the event in history. It would have been a good background information on this particular English-speaking princess but we can only guess who that might have been.