When ten-year-old Rebecca Randall leaves Sunnybrook Farm to go and live with her aunts, Miranda and Jane, in Riverboro neither she nor her aunts know quite what to expect. And with Rebecca around it's usually the unexpected that happens anyway. In fact it is this gift for the unexpected that means that life is never quite the same again for anyone with whom she comes into contact.

This classic story of a young girl growing up in the American state of Maine at the end of the l9th century follows Rebecca's life, education and escapades through the next seven years until the day, as the new mistress of her aunts' old brick house, she begins her adult life.