The Great Gilly Hopkins Study Guide

Paterson’s parents were Presbyterian missionaries working in the Republic of China at the time of her birth—her father was a minister who also ran a boys’ school. Her first language was Chinese. Following the 1937 Japanese invasion of China in the lead-up to World War II, the family returned to the United States and moved around the southern United States frequently. She eventually graduated from King College in Tennessee and went on to earn a master’s degree from the Presbyterian School of Christian Education in Virginia. Though she hoped to return to China as a missionary, Paterson ended up traveling to Japan instead, which influenced a great deal of her later writing. She began writing and publishing in the mid-1960s, beginning with a book on religious education for children and moving on to children’s fiction novels by the 1970s. Her novels have won numerous awards—she’s one of only a few authors to have been awarded the Newbery Medal twice, for Bridge to Terabithia and Jacob Have I Loved. Many of her novels feature young protagonists with subpar support, and due to the difficult subjects and themes they tackle, they’ve frequently been banned. She lives in Vermont.

Gilly’s mother Courtney is described multiple times as a “flower child”—or a “flower child gone to seed.” The term refers to the people involved in the countercultural hippie movement of the 1960s and specifically, to several events that took place in the San Francisco area during the Summer of Love in 1967, which is roughly when Gilly would’ve been born. The hippie movement coincided with various other progressive social movements in the United States and abroad, and hippies often protested in support of the Civil Rights Movement and gay rights, and against the Vietnam War and the draft. By the time the novel takes place (presumably around the time it was published in 1978), the foster care system was in the process of major overhauls. By 1974, increased funding meant that authorities had more resources to identify abuse and neglect (in both biological and foster families) and intervene. Though the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act didn’t pass until 1980, Gilly experiences (and resents) some of the prevailing thought processes that led to its passage. In part, it held that families should be kept together as much as possible. Certain parts of the law were later changed, particularly as critics successfully argued that it let neglectful or abusive parents off the hook in some cases. Still, it’s most common for children in foster care to be placed with biological relatives, rather than with families who are totally unrelated to them.

It’s possible to situate Gilly Hopkins—and Paterson’s realist children’s novels as a group—as part of a midcentury movement toward including realism and difficult themes in children’s novels. Natalie Babbit’s 1975 novel Tuck Everlasting deals frankly with death. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, Judy Blume’s 1970 classic, tackles puberty. And Lois Lowry’s debut novel from the same year, A Summer to Die, features a family dealing with the older daughter’s childhood leukemia diagnosis and death from the disease. It’s possible to see how this genre of “issue novels” has continued to evolve over time, and as issues change. Monday’s Not Coming, for instance, a 2018 novel by Tiffany Jackson inspired by real events, deals with child abuse, filicide, and the dangers of bureaucratic failures, particularly to poor Black girls in the United States. Gary Schmidt’s Orbiting Jupiter, like Gilly Hopkins, explores the U.S. foster care system, including its limits when it comes to its ability to protect children. Within the novel itself, Gilly’s full name, Galadriel, comes from J. R. R. Tolkien’s classic Lord of the Rings series, while she and Mr. Randolph enjoy William Wordsworth’s poem “Ode: Imitations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.”