I am torn. I don’t want to overhype Elizabeth Jordan, but I also wonder if that is even possible. She writes with such clarity, wit, and youthfulness that it is hard to believe her greatest works came out over a 100 years ago. They still feel so fresh.

It is equally hard to believe she’s been as forgotten in the churn of history as she has. Her writing sparkles with the optimism that marked the period before World War One, when she was a young woman working as a journalist and then an editor. That positivity seems to never have left her, and certainly didn’t leave her writing. So I guess it isn’t surprising that her good humored view of life, which would respond to any stress with the sunny irony of her favorite personal catchphrase, “Three Rousing Cheers!” might fall out of favor after a series of world wars and social upheaval. But if you’re looking for a great storyteller with a light touch, I can think of few better from her era or any other.

Elizabeth Jordan was a reporter first. Her writing has the precision, brevity, and clarity of voice that a novelist might take a lifetime to develop, but a newspaper person would have to hammer out daily. Her experiences as a pioneering newspaperwoman became the raw material for some of her greatest short stories, told through the eyes of her alter-ego, May Iverson. Like Jordan, May Iverson thinks she wants to be a nun after graduation, but is convinced by her father to give her other dream a try first. We are rewarded for her choice with a dozen stories about May Iverson’s career. Each story stands alone, but read in order they tell a full story that was meant to inspire others to live life boldly.

They are a genre all their own: part mystery, part romance, part comedy, and always entertaining. There’s a whole family sort of fun in these stories everyone can enjoy. I hope anyone whose been discouraged by eyesight problems and the difficulty of reading traditional large print will enjoy reading these upbeat stories.