Complete and unabridged, with 52 full-page plates by Albert Bierstadt, George Inness and Winslow Homer. A country girl visits rich city cousins, is laughed at for her plain clothes, and comes back six years later as a music teacher earning her own living. Alcott wrote the second half of the book after her readers asked what became of Polly, and used it to argue for work as the thing that makes a woman free. The fashionable family's collapse is handled without triumph, and the marriage at the end is the least interesting thing in it. Fifty-two plates by painters including Winslow Homer and James Tissot follow the same course as Polly, from girlhood among green landscapes to the grey river views of a working city.