An orphan girl is sent to college by a trustee she has never met, on condition that she writes to him monthly and expects no reply. The whole novel is her letters, with her own drawings. Jean Webster had campaigned for orphanage reform and put the case inside a love story that has never gone out of print. Forty-four plates by painters including John Lavery and Vincent van Gogh widen the story's world of letters, studios, parks and factories into the wider world her correspondence opens onto.