The True Heart by Sylvia Townshend Warner (Viking, 1929)

 

The True Heart is an odd book with a whimsical quality that lends it a unique tone that is both beguiling and sometimes confusing.

Suki Bond spends her first 16 years in an orphanage for girls and leaves there when one of the patronesses arranges a position for her as a maid-of-all-work at a desolate farm on an island in the coastal marshlands of England.  Mr. Norman runs the farm with his three taciturn sons.  Another boy, Eric, who is beautiful but strangely silent and withdrawn, also lives on the farm, but it is unclear what he is doing there.  Suki befriends this gentle soul, who responds to her attention and affection tenderly and amorously, and the two youngsters fall in love.  But when Eric suffers an epileptic fit it is revealed that he is considered an idiot and has been banished to the farm by his snobbish and hateful upper-class parents, who want nothing to do with their damaged and embarrassing son.  He is nevertheless returned to his hateful home and when Suki goes there to rescue him, she is cruelly treated and thrown out into the street.

Steadfast in her love for Eric, she endures hunger, cold, and grueling work while she devises a plan to reunite with Eric, marry him, and give him a loving and happy life.  As this plan relies upon a private audience with Queen Victoria, the reader is at first skeptical and then amazed when Suki, with the help of some very friendly strangers, executes it perfectly and successfully.  

The travails that Suki endures call to mind the similarly unfortunate Tess of the D'Ubervilles, but Suki refuses to become a victim of hate or fate, and her dignified struggles and quiet triumph make for very enjoyable and heartening reading.