Katy Carr is careless, quick-tempered and the eldest of six, and a fall from a swing she was forbidden to touch leaves her in bed for four years. Susan Coolidge wrote it in 1872 from a family she knew, and Cousin Helen's lessons in the School of Pain are Victorian to the bone. What survives is the household - six children running an ungoverned house - and Katy's temper, which the illness does not cure. Fifty-seven plates of nineteenth-century American painting, from Mary Cassatt to William Trost Richards, follow Katy through garden, shore and sickroom, matching picture to chapter.
