It's normal for children living in stepfamilies to have lots of different feelings and to feel different things at different times. This story shares Harriet's emotional experiences surrounding her stepfamily beginnings. The story has realistic and believable characters and situations to help readers to relate. Clear explanations of actions and emotions, and how to understand them.

Soon to be an Apple TV+ animated series starring Golden Globe nominee Beanie Feldstein and Emmy Award winner Jane Lynch, it's no secret that Harriet the Spy is a timeless classic that kids will love! Harriet M. Welsch is a spy. In her notebook, she writes down everything she knows about everyone, even her classmates and her best friends. Then Harriet loses track of her notebook, and it ends up in the wrong hands. Before she can stop them, her friends have read the always truthful, sometimes awful things she’s written about each of them. Will Harriet find a way to put her life and her friendships back together? "What the novel showed me as a child is that words have the power to hurt, but they can also heal, and that it’s much better in the long run to use this power for good than for evil."—New York Times bestselling author Meg Cabot

In this innovative analysis of canonical British novels, Campbell identifies a new literary device—the surrogate family—as a signal of cultural anxieties about young women’s changing relationship to matrimony across the long eighteenth century. By assembling chosen families rather than families of origin, Campbell convincingly argues, female protagonists in these works compensate for weak family ties, explore the world and themselves, prepare for idealized marriages, or sidestep marriage altogether. Tracing the evolution of this rich convention from the female characters in Defoe’s and Richardson’s fiction who are allowed some autonomy in choosing spouses, to the more explicitly feminist work of Haywood and Burney, in which connections between protagonists and their surrogate sisters and mothers can substitute for marriage itself, this book makes an ambitious intervention by upending a traditional trope—the model of the hierarchal family—ultimately offering a new lens through which to regard these familiar works.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1877.