Proper little Emily is sent to stay with her wealthy and disagreeable uncle in nineteenth-century Massachusetts, but she is headed off by the mischief-making Seth Marple, who leads her on an riotous escapade.

Behind the Book

There was a time I was very interested in the history of children’s literature and spent a lot of time collecting and reading the old books, particularly those from the Nineteenth Century. I would, in time, amass about three thousand of these books which I subsequently gave to the children’s collection at the University of Connecticut. The point being, Emily Upham’s Revenge was modeled on some of these old-fashioned girls’ books, full of their stiff, lecturing, and restrictive morality. In Emily Upham’s Revenge I tried to turn that heavy tone upside down—to make it funny. Then too, I had good friends who lived in North Brookfield, Massachusetts. There was an old railway station there which was fun to visit. All these things came together in the book.