A gripping and moving historical novel relating the troubled life of an intelligent and capable young woman in the early years of the nineteenth century. Based on the memoirs and diary of a real-life governess, this is the powerful tale of Ellen Weeton. Imprisoned in a cruel and loveless marriage, she is driven to the edge of madness, denied shelter in her own home and loses the thing she holds most dear in life - her only daughter, Mary. Abandoned and betrayed by both her brother and husband, in a society where women"s rights have not yet been invented, Ellen"s only hope of happiness is to win her daughter back. Paul Duthie"s debut novel draws upon the modern fascination with the legal and social restrictions faced by women at the time - yet its exquisite and compelling prose could as easily have been plucked straight from the pages of the work of the great nineteenth-century English novelists.