Eyebright

Isabella Bright, called Eyebright by everyone who knows her, is a bright-eyed, imaginative schoolgirl when Susan Coolidge’s 1879 story opens. The early chapters brim with playacting and friendship, but that comfort does not last: her mother dies, her father’s business collapses, and the two of them leave for a hardscrabble farm on a small island off the coast of Maine. What follows traces Eyebright’s growth from roughly twelve to fifteen as she learns to keep house, face real want, and meet reversals with steady, cheerful pluck rather than self-pity. Coolidge, best known for the What Katy Did books, wrote for girls without talking down to them. The result is a warm, plainly told account of resilience that suits younger readers and anyone drawn to nineteenth-century American domestic fiction.