Pollyanna

Orphaned and penniless, eleven-year-old Pollyanna Whittier is sent to live with her wealthy, rigid Aunt Polly, who takes her in out of duty and lodges her in a bare attic room. The child arrives with almost nothing — except a way of meeting the world her late father taught her, which the family always called simply the glad game: the discipline of finding, in any circumstance however bleak, something to be glad about.

In the gloomy village of Beldingsville the game goes quietly to work. One by one the town's hardest cases — a bedridden invalid, a miserly recluse, a bitter spinster, a lonely runaway, and at last Aunt Polly herself — are drawn, almost against their will, into playing, and the cold house and colder town begin to thaw around the irrepressible child at their centre.

Then an accident in the road leaves Pollyanna unable to walk, and the girl who taught a whole community to be glad discovers that she cannot, for a time, find anything to be glad about at all. The game she carried so lightly is suddenly on trial — and the town she remade must learn to play it back to her.

Warm, funny, and far tougher than its sentimental reputation suggests, Pollyanna gave the English language a word for cheerful optimism and has charmed readers for more than a century. This is the complete original 1913 novel — the book behind the Broadway play, the famous Mary Pickford film, and a debate over hope and resilience that has never quite settled.