The Transformation of Emily Spinnet

1863 England. Seventeen-year-old Emily Spinnet makes a promise to herself that she will never fall in love with a man when her father runs away with a barmaid, leaving her mother ill and taking the last of their money.

After her mother dies, she is sent to live with a distant aunt in the countryside of Yorkshire, where she works as a farmhand and endures a life of endless chores and torment from her horrid relatives. But when she encounters a young lawyer by the name of Augustus Clark, everything changes.

Clark is struck by her at once, and caught in a web of pursuits, Emily finds herself falling for this charming gentleman. But nightmares of her dying mother won’t let her break her promise, though jealousy springs when the wealthy father of a unmarried daughter also has Clark in his sight.

Soon begins a war of class and love, and of marriage and heartbreak, and when a murder sends this sleepy, idyllic village into chaos, it seems all order has been thrown out the window.