Anne Emery

Scarlet Royal

MacRae Smith, Philadelphia 1952, illus Manning de V. Lee

Macmillan, 1970

Westminster Press, 1976

Scholastic pb, 1980

Image Cascade Press

Margo, Connie and Molly Macintyre and their mother decide to open a riding school as they need to find a way
of making money. Margo already has a horse, a tricky creature called Scarlet Royal, and circumstances
dictate he has to be sold: unfortunately to a girl Margo doesn’t like. They’re kept busy running the riding school,
however, and then board a student, Neil Campbell, in exchange for help with the horses. Margo works at
getting Scarlet Royal back, and there’s also a romance.

Anne Emery was born Anne Eleanor McGuigan in Fargo, North Dakota. She studied at Northwestern University, and then travelled with her family for a year, including a visit to her professor father’s birthplace in Northern Ireland. She also studied for 9 months at the University of Grenoble in France.

She then started teaching, but after she married John Emery, and resigned to raise her family (when the dustjacket biography was written, she had five.) Anne Emery wrote prolifically for the teenage reader from the 1950s to the 1970s, and was the author of the Sally and Jean Burnaby series. She wrote just the one horse book: Scarlet Royal.

Finding the book: Scarlet Royal had no British publication. It was often republished, and is easy, and cheap, to find in the United States. Her books, including Scarlet Royal have now been republished by Image Cascade Publishing, so if you want, you can buy a brand new copy.

Many thanks to Susan Bourgeau for all her help with biographical details, photographs, and the book’s contents.

Sources and links:

Image Cascade Publishing - current publisher of Anne Emery