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Despite her deceptively frail appearance, she maintained the stance of a frontierswoman shaped by the extreme circumstances of her native state.

When a frontierswoman in the 19th-century wilderness begins to sense a sinister presence, her dread is dismissed by her husband.

The women, who also include a frontierswoman, a dressmaker and confidante to Mary Todd Lincoln, an entrepreneur, and educator and a suffragist, were chosen from more than four centuries of Virginia’s history.

Which familiar scene—the Indian massacre, the fated meeting between lawman and bandit, the gritty frontierswoman’s display of dogged perseverance—has been designed to collapse under its own weight, making way for some unexpected insight?

The other narrative branch in “Inland” belongs largely to Nora, a frontierswoman whose husband, Emmett, has gone missing while searching for water.