Synopsis

1900. Eighteen-year-old Hephzibah Wildman’s world is turned upside down when she loses her parents in a tragic accident. Homeless and destitute, she must leave the security of the Oxford college where her stepfather was Dean, to earn her living as a governess at Ingleton Hall.

Befriending Merritt Nightingale, the local parson and drawn to the handsome Thomas Egdon, she starts to build a new life for herself. When Hephzibah attracts the unwanted advances of her employer, Thomas’s father, the country squire Sir Richard Egdon, she makes the first of two desperate decisions that will change not only her own life but the lives of those around her.