Mary was plain, middle-aged and reliable. Her life centred on her father, the crabbed and difficult Canon Jocelyn, and on the quiet duties of a rector's daughter deep in the country. She never dreamed that her life was to be shaken to the core by an unlooked-for love affair. "The Rector's Daughter is a masterpiece...it is about love; filial love and married love and extreme sexual passion, and about the anguish, despair and intermittent bliss of every hopeless relationship between man and woman. It is a blisteringly honest account of middle-aged desire, that most painful of all afflictions, and at the same time a careful, tender study of a happy marriage" Susan Hill