The Girls and I

Jack is eleven, likes things tidy and regular, and lives in a house full of girls — his sisters, whom he is fond of and must always be patient with, the helter-skelter Anne worst of all. His account of one eventful stretch of family life — a lost diamond ornament, the dancing class, an illness, a stay at a farm — is the whole book. Mrs Molesworth wrote about a hundred books for children and had a rare ear for how they talk; the comedy lies in the gap between Jack's solemn narrative and what the reader can see, and L. Leslie Brooke's drawings match it. Fifty-one paintings from Frith to Cassatt, spanning 1800 to 1907, picture the crowded, comic world of children and family that Jack narrates.