Betty Cavanna was the author of popular teen romance novels, mysteries, and children's books for 45 years. She also wrote under the names Elizabeth Headley and Betsy Allen. She was nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Juvenile in 1970 and 1972.
Personal life
Cavanna had infantile paralysis when she was four years old, which left her unable to walk for several years. Later, she was able to walk with a steel brace. Her first job was on a Camden newspaper at age 12. Cavanna studied journalism at Douglass College, which is now part of Rutgers University. After college, she worked for a newspaper in Bayonne. Later, she worked in publicity and advertising for the Presbyterian Board of Christian Education in Philadelphia. Cavanna married Edward Headley in 1940 and they had one son. Headley died in 1952. In 1957, she married George Russell Harrison, a writer and a dean of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Harrison died in 1979. For the last few years of her life, Cavanna lived in Vézelay, France. She died at age 92 in 2001.
Writing career
Cavanna began writing in 1940. She published serials in American Girl, Boys Today, Gateway for Girls, Pioneer for Boys and other teenage magazines. Like many novels for teen girls of the era, her plots favored romance and conformity. The choice of the right dress and the right boyfriend were often the key to happiness. Cavanna's heroines generally had a special interest or ambition, and tended to be not typically "pretty". Her early romance novels presented a protagonist facing a personal problem, but her later novels matured to focus on a social or moral problem. Cavanna wrote the Connie Blair books, a career and mystery series, as "Betsy Allen". A friend of Cavanna's wrote the final book in the series in 1958, The Mystery of the Ruby Queens. In the 1960s, Cavanna wrote a series of books about the lives of boys in foreign countries. Her husband, George Harrison, took the photographs used in the books. Richard Alm characterizes Cavanna as "a writer of some importance". Cavanna's books have been translated into several foreign languages. Her manuscripts and correspondence are preserved in the de Grummond Collection at the University of Southern Mississippi.
