Barry Browning shows her true colors in this sports novel and school story from 1924, proving through her conduct as both an athlete and a student that she was "a real girl, generous to a fault, unquestioningly loyal, a fair opponent and a firm friend." Opening at summer camp, where Barry's mettle as an athlete and leader is tested, the narrative then follows the eponymous heroine and her friends as they return to school at Cranford High. When the boys' football team, led by Andy Kirk and Budd Smith, are victorious in the big game against Woodbridge, the Crandford girls, loyal members of the AA (Athletic Association), throw them a celebratory dinner. It is then that the new teacher, Miss Embree, a recent Vassar graduate, suggests that the girls start their own basketball team. Nothing would suit Barry and her girl friends - Jane Barr (who is the book's narrator), Dot Howard, Mary Todd, and Mildred Hartmore - better, but they encounter unexpected opposition from the boys, who do not wish to share the funds raised by the AA. It falls to Barry to solve the problem, first by staging an election coup - although only the boys had hitherto been active in the AA, as dues-paying members the girls were entitled, by the organization's bylaws, to vote - and then, once her point is carried, by raising the money independently, in order to restore a sense of unity to the school, now divided along male-female lines. Many exciting events, both sporting and scholastic, follow, as both girls' and boy's basketball teams flourish, and the school becomes caught up in an experiment in student self-government proposed by Principal Meyers. Here again there is strife between the boy and girl factions, largely stoked by the militant Mildred, but all ends well, and the book closes as Cranford triumphs in a coeducational track meet involving a number of nearby school...

The first of a trilogy featuring Barry Browning and her friends - the sequels are Barry and Budd and Barry Goes to College - Barry the Undaunted was author Earl Reed Silvers' first attempt at fiction featuring girls. Silvers (1891-1948) was Dean of Students at Rutgers University, where he also studied, and lived for most of his life in Rahway, New Jersey. Much of his fiction is set in this area of the state, and the town names - Cranford, Woodbridge, Plainfield, Linden, Westfield - will be familiar to anyone who knows the vicinity. I myself currently reside within Woodbridge Township, although I am not a New Jersey native, and did not grow up in the area. Most of the authors' many books were aimed at boy readers, and all of them feature the importance of sport. Sport, and how one "plays the game," is a metaphor for life in these stories, and a boy who is an honorable athlete and does his best for his team, will in Silvers' view also do his best for his school and for his nation. This is explicitly spelled out on more than one occasion throughout Silvers' books (I have now read fifteen of them), and idea of good sportsmanship leading to good citizenship is frequently extolled. What's interesting about Barry the Undaunted is that Silvers transplants this world view to the topic of girl/woman athletes and girl/woman citizens, and that he does this with such sympathy. His book is narrated by a girl - Barry's best friend and next-door neighbor, Jane - features a strong and appealing girl heroine, and is entirely on the girls' side, when it comes to female access to athletic activity, and participation in civic life. Not only goes the narrative suggest that the boys got what they deserved, vis-a-vis their defeat in the AA election fiasco - the narrator affirms at one point that "we had given them their chance to be generous, and they had not accepted it" - but the contrasting characters of Andy and Budd, and their reaction to the girls being more active, make it plain which side the author is on. So completely does the author capture the girls' perspective, through his sympathetic narrator, that if I hadn't known the book was written by a man, I would have thought the author was female.

It is difficult not to read this story as Silvers' response to some of the changes in the society around him, at the time of writing. The book was published a mere three years after the 19th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gave women the right to vote, and it addresses schoolgirls becoming active voters and full participants, both in an athletic association, and in their school government election. The narrative clearly implies that this right was always theirs, even though it had only just been claimed, leading the reader to wonder whether Silvers had a similar feeling about woman suffrage. Perhaps Silvers wrote this series with these developments in mind, hoping to influence girls to also become good citizens (through sport, of course!), now that they would grow up to become voters. All of this is fascinating, of course, but the story itself is also engaging. Barry is a little too much of a paragon - a common failing, when it comes to Silvers' main protagonists - but I was impressed by the fact that the author didn't demonize some of his other, more prickly characters. Andy, for instance, is depicted more as a headstrong, fiery-tempered and immature young man, than as someone who is motivated by spite, and he is allowed his redemption. Mildred, although gently lampooned as a militant suffragist, is also allowed her virtues, and is treated with sympathy here, and in the other books in the series.

All in all, this is well worth tracking down, something that was once almost impossible to do - I read it in the rare book room of my university - but no more! It is now available to read on the Internet Archive, although the sequels are, alas, still difficult to come by. ( )