The Visionary Girls Starkey Summary

Starkey, Marion. The Visionary Girls. Canada. Little, Brown and Company. 1973.

On April 13th 1901, in Worcester, Massachusetts, a lady by the name of Marion Starkey was born. She was the daughter of Alice T (Gray) Starkey and Arthur E. Starkey, who was known best as a painter and publisher. In 1922 and 1935, Marion received her B.S and M.A from Boston University, and later graduated from Harvard in 1946. She was also a member of many organizations, which included League of Women Voters, Lynn and Saugus Historical Society, Phi Beta Kappa. In 1953 and 1958, she received an award called the Guggenheim Fellowship Award. The Guggenheim Fellowship is an award “intended for men and women who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for
When Starkey tells this story, she tells it in the form of how the girls think. She explains and tells her views of what she thought really happened to the girls. She has a clear line in the book that is stated “the book of Revelation was urgently studied to learn the details of doomsday” (29). With the wording, she is speaking as a narrator and is giving her readers an example or answer to what is going on and why she also uses nouns like he, she, their, and writes the first names of the characters to explain what they are doing. The big part in the book that made me realize that her writing style was narrative was when she gave the definition of a witch in the way the people in that time period would call a witch, so we could understand what a witch meant to them. She states, “A witch was anyone, male or female, who bound his soul over to the devil in return for magical powers…torment enemies at a distance” (49). Also, she tells exactly what one of her charters does. For example, she says “Young Ann entered into her mother’s dream” and then says “The future had no interest for the elder Ann. “What of the past?” she asked. (30). Therefore, the “she asked” clearly states that she is telling the