There are more Elsie books? I only ever read one...and at this remove from elementary school couldn't tell you which one!! The county library where I grew up was in a little, little old house and only had the one copy, which I read several times...and always cried over, too...
Oh, thank you enormously for the book reviews. What total fun! If I don't feel I need to read them, it will only be because you have made them properly vivid and I can just go back to my wonderfully overwrought Oz books. (The Three Adepts are my favorite Oz characters. But that's another story!)
Elsie would have thought those socks were sinful, I think. Oh, yum.
i didn't know there were so many ED books!! i have only the first three and read them over and over as a kid, my mom, liberal lutheran pastor, just could not understand what i found fascinating about the little puritanical tales and still teases me about my former obsession with them to this day. i haven't thought about them in years, i wonder if i can find them while i'm up there for christmas.... thanks for bringing back these memories!! 
I'm reading all the Elsie books for the first time, and it is *so* frustrating trying to find unabridged books. The only way to go is to get the Dodd Mead early editions prior to 1890, or go for the A Burt editions that promise "complete authorized version." Unless you do, you'll miss the scene where our hero, Mr. Horace Dinsmore, shuts Elsie in a dark closet as punishment for asking to play jack stones a second time when she's already been told "no." But then visitors come and he forgets and leaves poor Elsie in the cold dark closet all day, with nothing to eat!
These wondrous books are chicken soup for the masochist's soul! There are some 2004 paperbacks that promise "complete original Elsie" but the first one I read had some of the pages missing and duplicates of others! That made me very angry and I wanted to tell the publisher to shove that particular Elsie %$***!!@#$
Best,
Rebecca
Thank you, oh THANK YOU for showing the absurdities and (genuine) horror of Elsie. I was stuck in a hospital for ten weeks; for the heavens of it googled Elsie Dinsmore and discovered the Elsie Club for little Christian girls. I joined right away. I disclosed in the membership application that I was residing in a hospital: I did not have the nerve to say that the application was being written from my bed. ELSIE ROCKS!
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