page_title: Helen Dore Boylston
section_title: Biography
hierarchical_section_title: Helen Dore Boylston / Biography
caption_attribution_description: Ford Model T Touring 1923
context_page_description: Helen Dore Boylston was the American author of the popular "Sue Barton" nurse series and "Carol Page" actor series.
context_section_description: Born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Boylston spent her childhood there, and was nicknamed "Troub", short for Troubles.  She attended Simmons College in Boston for a year. She thought of studying medicine like her father, but chose nursing since the training was shorter. She graduated as a nurse from Massachusetts General Hospital in 1915 and sailed for France to serve in the First World War with the Harvard Medical Unit, as part of the British Expeditionary Force. 
    She nursed the wounded at a front-line field hospital, specializing as a nurse anesthetist and reaching the rank of captain. Boylston wrote about her experiences in Sister: The War Diary of a Nurse, which was published in 1927.
  After the 1918 Armistice, Boylston remained in Europe working for the Red Cross for two years providing services to civilians in Albania, Poland, Russia, Italy, and Germany. Boylston met reporter Rose Wilder Lane, daughter of the not-yet-famous Laura Ingalls Wilder on a train between Paris and Warsaw.
  During periods in the United States, Boylston worked as the head of an outpatient department and as an instructor in anesthesiology at Massachusetts General Hospital, as well a psychiatric nurse in New York City and a head nurse in a Connecticut hospital, experiences she was to mine in future books. Between 1921 and 1924 she worked again with the Red Cross in Europe, and in 1925 wrote a reminiscence of her student nursing days that was published in the American Journal of Nursing.
  Boylston was still anxious for adventure and wrote to a friend "Daddy wants me to settle down, but I'm young! I'm young! Why shouldn't I live? What is old age if it has no memories except of 40 years or so of blank days?" In 1926 Lane and Boylston traveled to Europe with the goal of moving to Albania and earning their living by writing.  In preparation, between March and September 1926 they lived in Paris, studying French, Italian, German and Russian at the Berlitz School.  In August they purchased a maroon Model T Ford which they named "Zenobia" in honor of the Bedouin queen of ancient times, and set off to Albania with their French maid, Yvonne.  An account of the journey, called Travels With Zenobia: Paris to Albania by Model T Ford was published in 1983.
  Boylston lived in a comfortable house in Tirana, Albania for two years.  The house she shared with Lane was the scene of numerous parties, where members of the Albanian government danced to the sound of their imported Victrola.  According to her publisher, Boylston "once made the Albanian Prime Minister carry her trunk off the boat and tried to tip him, not knowing who he was." She was also "shot at for two hours in a ditch in southern Albania, owing to a mistake in identity". While in Albania, Boylston assisted at an Albanian school of nursing that was directed by a fellow graduate from the School of Nursing at Massachusetts General Hospital. After about two years,  Boylston saw a picture of a baked potato in a magazine, and feeling an "irresistible lure", returned to the US.  A less dramatic version has her deciding to accompany Lane home after Lane had received a disturbing cablegram from her parents in January 1928.
  In the summer of 1928 Boylston arrived at Rocky Ridge, the Wilder family farmhouse in Mansfield, Missouri.  Encouraged by the publication of her War Diary in book form, she decided to gain a living by writing, though she also supported in part by inherited income. She initially lived in a tent on a hill near the farmhouse, though the plan was that Boylston and Lane would live in the remodeled and modernized farmhouse, while Lane's parents, Laura Ingalls Wilder and Almanzo Wilder, moved into a newly built English stone cottage.
  Boylston lost considerable sums of investment income in the Depression and in the early 1930s moved east to work again as a nurse.
  In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Boylston began writing and publishing stories more seriously. She published articles and stories in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, and Argosy, and wrote a radio script for the Canadian Broadcasting Company
caption: A Model T Ford
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