Tess of the Storm Country

Tessibel Skinner lives in a rotting shanty on the edge of Ithaca, where fish bones litter the ground and decent folk cross the street to avoid her family. Her father, a rough fisherman, has been labelled a murderer, and the whole town has written her off as cursed, wild, beyond redemption. But Tessibel has bare feet, beauty, and an innocence that refuses to be crushed. She sets out to clear her father's name, and in the process encounters a world that has never looked twice at a girl like her: the bright, polished halls of Cornell University, where brainy beauties look through her as though she were invisible. A toad is her only confidant. Her education amounts to almost nothing. And yet she persists. This is the story of a girl from the storm country, from the margins, fighting her way into a story that shouldn't have a place for her. It was once a sensation, adapted twice for the screen by Mary Pickford, and it remains a fierce, old-fashioned plea for the humanity of those society deems worthless.