Miss Hickory by Carolyn Sherwin Bailey

First published: 1946; illustrated

Subjects: Friendship, gender roles, and nature

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Fantasy

Time of work: The 1940’s

Recommended Ages: 10-13

Locale: The New Hampshire countryside

Principal Characters:

• Miss Hickory, a country doll whose body is an apple twig and whose head is a hickory nut
• Crow, a tough but kind-hearted bird
• Mr. T. Willard-Brown, a barn cat
• Squirrel, a forgetful and temperamental animal
• Ann, a little girl who often visits the farmhouse where Miss Hickory lived before the story begins
• Timothy, a young friend of Ann

Form and Content

A doll made of an apple twig and a hickory nut is the protagonist of Carolyn Sherwin Bailey’s Newbery Medal-winning fantasy. Miss Hickory’s survival in a bird’s nest through a cold country winter combines brisk, ironic humor with touches of whimsy and poignancy to form a story with provocative and contradictory implications about motherhood and gender roles. Lively black-and-white drawings by Ruth Gannet illustrate the main event of each chapter, with special emphasis on Miss Hickory’s interactions with the various animals whom she encounters.

Miss Hickory opens as the doll’s crusty friend Crow informs her that the farm house is being shut up for the winter and that she must plan to move from her corn cob house under a lilac bush to a sturdier and warmer shelter. Initially disbelieving, Miss Hickory soon finds that she has indeed been forgotten by the departing family and must accept Crow’s help in finding her a new home in an empty robin’s nest.

A series of loosely connected adventures ensues. Her neighbor Squirrel inspires both scorn and fear as Miss Hickory alternately mocks him for forgetting where he has buried his nuts and considers the temptation that her own head might present to the hungry animal. She makes friends with the Hen-Pheasants, whose husbands have deserted them for the winter, and organizes them into a ladies’ aid society. At Christmas, Miss Hickory follows a solemn procession of animals to the barn, where her “hardheadedness,” a characteristic frequently emphasized in the text, prevents her from seeing a miraculous manifestation of Christ. Along the way, however, she does meet Fawn, who happily tells Miss Hickory that he expects to see his mother, a doe who died trying to protect him from a hunter’s bullets. With the approach of spring, Crow returns and takes Miss Hickory on an exhilarating flight high in the sky. Later, a frosty April morning finds her dislodging Bull Frog from the ice. She pulls him free not only from ice but also from his old skin as well.

Fate, however, does not reward her good deeds, for she returns to her nest to find that Robin has resumed occupancy. Remembering suddenly that she has not heard or seen Squirrel for quite some time, she decides to take over his hole. Squirrel, however, is still there and engages her in an acrimonious dispute that ends with Squirrel biting off Miss Hickory’s head. Although disengaged from its body, the head continues to think, recriminating itself for its past hardheadedness and selfishness until the Squirrel has eaten it completely. The little twig body, however, surges with life and runs to the apple tree, where it bonds to an upper branch.

The story closes as the little girl, Ann, returns to the farm and climbs the apple tree with her friend Timothy. Timothy explains that the apple twig, formerly Miss Hickory, is a scion, a new graft that has caused the old tree to bloom anew after years of infertility.

Critical Context

Miss Hickory lacks the swashbuckling plot lines and magically empowered characters that have become popular in fantasies written in the decades succeeding its publication. Nevertheless, its vivid, authentic voice and appealing illustrations continue to attract readers. It is the only one of the author’s seventy-eight fiction and nonfiction publications for children that is still well known.

The book adds a unique element to the body of fiction featuring toys as protagonists. Unlike stories such as Carlo Collodi’s Le Avventure di Pinocchio (1881-1882; The Adventures of Pinocchio, 1892) and Margery Williams’ The Velveteen Rabbit (1922), it portrays a toy who neither wishes nor attempts to become “real.” While some may see her transformation into an insensate scion as a negative contrast to Pinocchio’s and the Velveteen Rabbit’s bodily transformations into “real” beings at their stories’ conclusions, Miss Hickory’s sense of inward completeness and personal sufficiency throughout most of the story is a striking contrast to other toy characters’ feelings of anguished inadequacy.

Miss Hickory also contributed to the development of an important character type in children’s literature: the “intelligent spinster.” P. L. Travers initiated the type with Mary Poppins (1934), and the following decades saw the addition of new dimensions to this image of a self-sufficient, mature single woman, including Ellen MacGregor’s Miss Pickerell Goes to Mars (1951) and its sequels and Betty MacDonald’s Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle (1947) and its sequels.