Four Gates

Four girls who gather at an old widow's house are told that each of them may enter the heavenly City by a different gate — east, north, south or west — and the book follows the very different roads their lives then take: a sick mother, an unexpected calling, a home to keep, a hard lesson. Amy Le Feuvre arranged her story as a set of parallel lives, which was ambitious for the tract trade. Fifty-six plates after painters including Millais and Wilkie open the four roads outward into a wider world of landscapes and quiet domestic scenes.