The Granite Cliffs — Rosemary Aitken

Love, life and loss in Edwardian England

Victoria Flower, motherless and nearing womanhood, is beginning to chafe against the restrictions of her life as the vicar's only daughter in a remote Cornish mining town. Her honourable and well-meaning father, though disillusioned by the impossibility of his spiritual task, thinks he has found a suitable companion for her when he introduces a gentle, musical young curate into the parish. Indeed a friendship blossoms, as Victoria finds a fellow-sufferer in his rather gauche and awkward ways. All this is to change, however, when a accident at the granite-pit brings Victoria into close contact with stone-worker Daniel Olds, whose rugged muscularity she has already secretly admired, and finds the admiration mutual. However, there is no possibility of a match. Convention and society are against them, and Dan is already promised to local girl, Mollie Coombs, who is not likely to give up her beau without a struggle. The Curate, too, shows a determined side, though he proves to have a secret of his own.

Set at a time when Edwardian convention was absolute and when the Penwith mining industry was in crisis and decline, this book offers a lively glimpse at the social and economic realities of love, life and loss in early twentieth-century Cornwall.