Les Lumières d'Assam

From lush India to the sordid quarters of Newcastle, from a privileged colonial existence to the suffragette struggles, the journey of a determined and courageous woman, resolved to fight against adversity to ensure her independence.
Clarrie Belhaven lives an idyllic youth on her father's Indian tea plantation with her sister Olivia. But his alcoholism and debts jeopardize their inheritance, and when he dies suddenly, the young women find themselves destitute. Proud Clarrie, having rejected the help of their neighbour, the charming Wesley Robson, the two sisters must leave India and join their cousin, a pub landlord, in England. Transformed into a domestic slave by his wife, Clarrie will try to escape her grip by taking a job as a governess for a lawyer. But the reappearance of a man from her past threatens to turn everything upside down...

Janet MacLeod Trotter delivers a magnificent novelistic saga, in which her heroine reminds us of Scarlett from  Gone with the Wind.