Elisabeth Ogilvie books

Bennett’s Island Reading Order

Cass Phillips Reading Order

Jennie Trilogy Reading Order

Mirabelle Taggart Reading Order

Non-Fiction

Standalone Novels

Wildfire Reading Order

Elisabeth Ogilvie (1917-2006) was an American novelist who set most of her work along the Maine coast. She is best known for the Bennett’s Island series, which began with High Tide at Noon in 1944 and eventually grew to nine novels spanning the better part of the twentieth century. The series follows the Bennett family on a fictional lobstering island and draws on Ogilvie’s own decades of living on Maine islands.

Beyond Bennett’s Island, Ogilvie wrote prolifically across several other series and many standalone novels. The Jennie Trilogy is a historical series set in early nineteenth-century Maine and Scotland. The Cass Phillips and Mirabelle Taggart books are shorter series aimed at younger readers. Her standalone novels number nearly thirty and range from gothic mysteries to quiet domestic fiction, almost always set in coastal New England.

Ogilvie also contributed to the Wildfire young adult romance series published by Scholastic in the late 1970s and 1980s. Her non-fiction memoir My World Is an Island (1950) describes her life on a Maine island. Across all her work, the Maine setting is the constant, and readers return to her books for the sense of place as much as the stories themselves.