Dear Betty, Love, Edith: Letters and secret thoughts from a Minneapolis ingenue while a Wellesley student in 1916, a nurse’s aide in WWI Paris, a newlywed in Prohibition Chicago, and a Pasadena divorcee

When Mary Ames Mitchell researched her genealogy, she learned that letters her grandmother Edith wrote to her first cousin Betty had been saved for five decades in an old attic in St. Paul, Minnesota. Edith began her correspondence in 1909 after Betty left the Twin Cities to study in Boston at Miss Winsor’s finishing school. Later, during WWI, the cousins worked together for the American Fund for French Wounded in Paris. Edith wrote her last letter weeks before her premature death in California in 1965 - when Mary was fourteen. Learning that her grandmother had fought alcoholism, Mary wanted desperately to know why a successful and bright woman became so unhappy. Touched and fascinated by her grandmother’s candid and tender descriptions of being a teenager, Ivy league college student, nurses aide, and Chicago socialite, Mary lovingly transcribed the letters and published them as Dear Betty, Love, Edith, so her cousins and brothers could read them, too. In the process of piecing together the historical background, Mary collaborated with Betty’s ninety-plus-year-old daughters, Leila and Kitty, who contributed their own rich memories.