I first read it when I was a teenager, so mostly I read it with an increasingly gaping jaw. I just couldn't believe that it was really as terrible as it was. Surely there would be a twist at the end, I thought! But no.

Porter's earlier books - Freckles and A Girl of the Limberlost - still have fans, and I really ought to have read them for my honors project because they were so popular at the time. But I just couldn't do it. Her Father's Daughter left me too twitchy about Porter's work.