That Monroe girl - Diane Cosgrove

It's 1913. Fifteen-year-old Malise Monroe earns herself an education teaching younger children at a Dundee schoolhouse. Her father is passionately devoted to improving conditions for workers in the jute industry and battles against the Fraser family, the local factory's idle, rich owners.

Despite sharing her father's beliefs, Malise cannot help finding herself attracted to Neil Fraser, the family's good-looking younger son. Her innocent flirting leads to a terrible incident and Malise finds herself pregnant. Utterly abandoned, Malise has no choice but to accept a proposal of marriage from a much older man, the schoolteacher Gordon Scott.

Then the war comes and everything changes forever. But as Malise takes up her father's cause, she finds herself with an even bigger battle on her hands...