The Help author Kathryn Stocketts new novel is inspired by this moving photograph

Bestselling author Kathryn Stockett had been trying to answer a question.She was writing a novel set in Depression-era Mississippi, and she needed to know where the children went when their families fell apart in 1933. The research led her to orphanages, and then to the Gulf Coast canneries where older orphan girls were sent to shuck oysters once they were no longer considered adoptable.Photographer Lewis Hine documented these girls.

Stockett spent days going through his images.Then one stopped her.A 7-year-old named Rosie, two years into the job, stares directly into the camera, oyster in hand, her crystal clear blue eyes piercing straight through the lens.“It was in Rosie’s photograph that I found my narrator, Meg,” Stockett said in an exclusive interview with The Post.Meg is the central figure in Stockett’s new novel “The Calamity Club” (Spiegel & Grau; May 5).

The 11-year-old is trapped in a rundown Oxford orphanage where the volunteer ladies dote on babies and largely ignore the older girls.Once a girl ages past the point of easy adoption, the orphanage ships her to the Biloxi canneries, where cheap and sometimes free young labor has its own economic logic that no child-labor law ever quite managed to stop. Birdie Calhoun, 24, god-fearing and freshly humiliated by having to ask her polished younger sister for money, becomes Meg’s unlikely ally when she begins volunteering at the orphanage.

The two of them are up against a town that has already decided which females matter and which do not.“The Calamity Club” is Stockett’s first novel since “The Help,” her 2009 debut that spent more than 100 weeks on the bestseller list and was adapted into an Academy Award-nominated film.Researching the new book, Stockett dove into some of Mississippi’s bleakest history.

By 1928, the state had passed a sterilization law targeting people labeled with “idiocy, imbecility, feeblemindedness or epilepsy,” a category that in practice was ai...