He established the style of the modern short story and influenced many great writers, including George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf.

    Marguerite and her elderly nurse are left to die on a island off the coast of Canada. Her guardian announces that she had disgraced him and is no longer a virgin. No one appeals her unjust sentence on trumped up charges. The young man who had hoped to marry her shares her exile. Together the three people, none of them trained in farming or house building struggle to erect shelter, and plant crops before winter comes.

    In 1873, an eleven-year-old orphan girl is adopted by Canadian settlers and travels to a new life on a farm in Nova Scotia.