In her 1926 debut, Roberts creates a psychologically astute portrait of Ellen Chesser, daughter of a poor itinerant farmer in turn-of-the-century Kentucky, tracing her life from age 14 through her difficult marriage and middle-age. Reduced to the bare elements of life, her world becomes a ceremony of daily duties that bind her to the natural world and her family, while against all privations and the forces that would subdue her, Ellen is sustained by a sense of wonder and an awareness of her own being.