Mary Caney possessed a remarkable strength of character. She was born to a Norfolk agricultural labourer in 1790 and showed great resilience and strength throughout a lifetime of deprivation and hardship. Mary died in 1878 and the story plots the ups and downs, of which there were many, throughout her long life. It is based on a skeleton of fact wrapped up in a liberal amount of fiction revealing much about rural social history of that era.

Mary Caney was a real person and many of the dates and events in the book have been gleaned from church records, censuses and newspaper reports spanning her lifetime.