The May family grown up: a summer holiday at the seaside, an actress with a past, a stepson nobody knows what to do with, and a parish that must be kept going. Yonge lived her whole life in one Hampshire village, taught Sunday school there for seventy-one years, and gave the profits of her bestselling novel to fit out a missionary schooner. She wrote the middle-class family as a moral institution, and knew it from the inside.