The Courage of Sarah Noble

The Courage of Sarah Noble is a short novel for children by Alice Dalgliesh, published in 1954. It received a Newbery Honor Award and is based on a story from the early eighteenth century.

Sarah Noble travels with her father into the Connecticut wilderness to help him build a house for a family that will follow them. She is eight years old, the work is hard, and the isolation is complete. When her father returns east to collect the other children, Sarah is left with a neighbouring Native family, where she has to manage without her own people and discover what she is capable of. Her experiences with the Schaghticoke, as the book describes them, form the centre of the story, which stays close to what a child of her age would notice and understand.

Dalgliesh wrote a number of historical books for young readers, and this one is often used as an introduction to colonial settlement told from a child's point of view, with the friendship between Sarah and the people who shelter her at the heart of it.