Elfride is the daughter of the Rector of Endelstow, a remote sea-swept parish in Cornwall based on St. Juliot, where Thomas Hardy began the book during the first days of his courtship of his first wife Emma. Blue-eyed and high-spirited, Elfride has little experience of the world beyond, and becomes entangled with two men: the boyish architect, Stephen Smith, and the older literary man, Henry Knight. The former friends become rivals, and Elfride faces an agonizing choice.