The Saturdays by Elizabeth Enright

First published: 1941; illustrated

Subjects: Coming-of-age, family, and friendship

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Domestic realism

Time of work: The early 1940’s

Recommended Ages: 10-13

Locale: New York City

Principal Characters:

• Mona Melendy, the eldest of the Melendy children, thirteen years old and an aspiring actress
• Rush Melendy, twelve, a pragmatic musician
• Miranda “Randy” Melendy, ten, the artistic creator of I.S.A.A.C.
• Oliver Melendy, the youngest of the four siblings, an amiable and thoughtful six-year-old
• Mrs. Evangeline “Cuffy” Cuthbert-Stanley, the long-suffering housekeeper and surrogate parent to the motherless Melendy children
• Mr. Melendy, the weary father of the four siblings
• Willy Sloper, the Melendy family caretaker and furnaceman
• Mrs. Oliphant, an elderly family friend who becomes the children’s generous benefactor

Form and Content

The Saturdays is an optimistic account of the creativity of four almost impossibly precocious yet somehow believable children. Elizabeth Enright’s Melendy siblings exude talent and good-natured enthusiasm, presenting an idealized family in which all members work together in respectful harmony.

The novel opens as Mona, Rush, Randy, and Oliver Melendy, assembled in their beloved “office” (actually a large playroom on the uppermost floor of their New York City home), complain about the prospect of spending another dreary and boring Saturday with nothing to do. The children, who live with their father and their adored nurse, Cuffy, are all inordinately talented and sophisticated for their ages: Mona is an aspiring actress who quotes William Shakespeare prolifically; Rush is an expert pianist and a lover of classical music and opera; Randy harbors both an appreciation for art and a talent for painting; and even contented young Oliver seems driven by an intellectual curiosity that exceeds his years. Randy offers a proposition: The Melendys will pool their weekly allowances and give the resulting sum to one child each week, in turn; the recipient of the money will then select a particular adventure on which to embark alone on Saturday afternoon. The club is christened I.S.A.A.C., or the Independent Saturday Afternoon Adventure Club.

Because I.S.A.A.C. was Randy’s idea, it is agreed that the first Saturday will be hers. She chooses to walk the length of Fifth Avenue to the art gallery where a collection of “French pictures” is being shown. Randy immerses herself in the paintings, finally choosing as her favorite a work called The Princess. As she admires the painting, she is greeted by Mrs. Oliphant, an elderly family acquaintance who informs Randy that she herself was the young subject of The Princess when she was about Randy’s age and a resident of Paris. Mrs. Oliphant invites Randy to a grand afternoon tea and enthralls her young guest with tales of her own girlhood adventures.

The novel proceeds in much the same manner, with each chapter dealing with a single Saturday and its events. Rush attends the German opera Siegfried. Mona, lured by the fancy script on a Broadway window, submits herself to the talents of Mr. Edward and Miss Pearl; she emerges from the beauty parlor several hours later, having been transformed from a girl with long pigtails to a sophisticated young lady with a bob and manicure. Oliver goes to the circus in Madison Square Garden, where he enjoys both the spectacle of the performance and a vast array of foodstuffs; sick and lost at the end of the afternoon, he must be escorted home by a police officer astride a grand horse.

All the Melendy family’s experiences, however, are not fun and games. Randy carelessly leaves a dress hanging over a heated lightbulb in the family storeroom and causes a small fire. Similarly, Rush’s attempts to care for the household’s aging furnace in Willy Sloper’s absence result in a near-tragic encounter with coal gas. Father’s decision to replace the decrepit furnace with a more efficient model warrants financial cutbacks and a decision to eliminate the rent payments on the family’s usual vacation spot away from the city. Stoically, the four young Melendys try not to complain, but they inadvertently let slip news of their situation during an outing with Mrs. Oliphant. The old lady offers her family lighthouse at the seashore as an alternative, and the family eagerly accepts her offer. The lighthouse proves to be idyllic, and the Melendy children prepare for a summer in which every day will be a “Saturday.”

Critical Context

Elizabeth Enright, originally trained as an illustrator, won a Newbery Medal for her novel Thimble Summer (1938), the story of nine-year-old tomboy Garnet Linden and her experiences growing up on a Wisconsin farm during a hot, Depression-era summer. The title of this work refers to the main character’s discovery of a thimble in a stream; Garnet views her find as a good omen, and this attitude contributes the same optimism to Thimble Summer that is found in Enright’s later works. Garnet’s story also features the stable, single-parent family found in Enright’s other novels and that is, in fact, a part of the author’s own biography.

The Saturdays is the first novel in a series of four about the Melendy family. In The Four-Story Mistake (1942), the family moves from their Manhattan home to the country, an experience that also mirrors the author’s own childhood. Then There Were Five (1944) tells of the addition of a new Melendy family member, and Spiderweb for Two: A Melendy Maze (1951) finds Randy and Oliver pursuing a mysterious scavenger hunt after the older children leave for boarding school. Later, Enright introduced another family, the Blakes, in her novels Gone-Away Lake (1957) and Return to Gone-Away (1961).