The True Heart by Sylvia Townsend Warner

The kind of novelist who inspires an intense sense of ownership in her fans ... her sympathies tended naturally to the marginal the vulnerable the exploited the obscure Sarah Waters Sukey Bond a sixteenyearold orphan is sent to work as a servant at a farm on the remote Essex Marshes. There she falls in love with gentle unworldly Eric the son of the rectors wife only for them to be separated when their relationship is discovered. But nothing will deter Sukey in her quest to be reunited with her Paperback softback