The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe

A widow with seven children in a New York tenement, the eldest at work at twelve, and a family that must decide which of them can be spared to school. Amanda Douglas wrote domestic novels of American city life and this is her hardest. The title is a joke the book does not share; the rescue, when it comes, is partial. Fifty-seven plates by painters including Winslow Homer and Thomas Cole trace the themes of home, work and hard-won return that run through Amanda Douglas's tenement story.