Pepper died when Phronsie was a baby, and oldest children Ebenezer (Ben) and Mary (Polly) are very much parentified children, having to labor long and hard each day to help to take care of their three younger siblings and hold the household together, along with helping their mother. Pepper and her five young children go through to keep the wolf from the door. The plots of the four books of the original series:įive Little Peppers and How They Grew concerns the struggle Mrs.

Overall, in spite of the annoying Victorian tendency towards over the top sentimentality and emotionalism, it really is a charming series, a really sweet picture of a vanished world. She wrote even more books about the family, some of them so-called “midquels,” like Five Little Peppers Abroad (which picks up exactly where Five Little Peppers Midway, the second book, leaves off) and Five Little Peppers at School, and some of them just books of stories that don’t really add anything to the overall series, like The Stories Polly Pepper Told in the Little Brown House and The Five Little Peppers and Their Friends. Stone decided not to just give them the stories in book form and then add some new stories, but to create a whole original book with all new stories and its own unifying plot.įans ended up liking it so much that she was driven to create a four-book series, and after she thought the series was complete when the baby of the family, Phronsie (Sophronia), finally came into adulthood and got married, fans still clamoured for more. She had first introduced the Peppers in a series of stories published in the newspaper, and the readers liked them so much that they demanded a whole book about them. In 2009 I started going through the whole series as an adult, something I didn’t do as a preteen, having only read the first book and then not having finished the sequel.

Probably in 1991, I first read the children’s classic Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, originally published in 1880 by Harriett Mulford Stone, under the pseudonym Margaret Sidney. WARNING: CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS FOR ALL OF THE BOOKS!

Five little peppers books in order