Billy Neilson, orphaned at eighteen, writes to her father's old friend William Henshaw for a home - and the three Henshaw brothers who take her in have all assumed from the name that Billy is a boy. Porter trained as a singer in Boston before turning to fiction and in 1913 gave the language the word Pollyanna; this is the first of the Billy books, and the household of confirmed bachelors is genuinely funny. Fifty-five plates of summer light by painters including Childe Hassam and Willard Metcalf carry the book's warmth from its first page to its last.