Elsie Venner

Complete and unabridged, with 54 full-page plates by Thomas Cole, Francis Grant and Edvard Munch. A New England schoolmaster meets a pupil the other girls will not sit near — cold to the touch, silent, with something in her look nobody can hold — and the book asks whether she can be held responsible for what she is. Holmes was a physician who coined the word anaesthesia and told doctors they were carrying childbed fever on their hands; here he attacks Calvinist original sin with a case study, and lost friends over it. Fifty-four plates of Millet and Turner carry the book's themes of country labor, weather, and light, from 1725 to 1902.