Joan's Handful

A rector's daughter takes charge of four children left on the parish and a neighbour who wants nothing to do with any of them. Amy Le Feuvre wrote a great many books for the religious tract trade and had a real gift for children's dialogue. The evangelism is explicit and the household comedy underneath it is genuinely funny. Fifty-eight plates from Mary Cassatt, John MacWhirter and others survey the domestic and pastoral world of the story, from stocking-mending interiors to waterfalls and Tyrolean summers.