A Girl of the Limberlost

Elnora Comstock walks to high school in clothes the town laughs at and pays her own fees by selling moths she catches in the swamp — while her mother, widowed on the night she was born, cannot look at her without seeing the loss. Stratton-Porter was a field naturalist and photographer before she was a novelist, and the Limberlost she wrote about was being drained even as the book sold half a million copies. The moths are real, the mother thaws late, and the swamp does not survive. Fifty-seven plates of marsh light and rural labor, from George Inness to Henry Ossawa Tanner, keep the naturalist's world of the novel in view.