A girl walks slowly down the aisle of the Chapel. Defiance is in her eyes and stubborn pride in the bold tilt of her head. As she passes, the women draw aside their skirts and one of them spits, venomously. Maggie Craig has committed the unpardonable sin of becoming pregnant by a man who cannot marry her.

Maggie Craig is set in the industrial northwest of England in the last century; a world where the fanatical religious puritanism of the Chapel-goers rages fiercely among a people whose livelihood depends on the grim cotton mills. Into this bleak environment walks Maggie Craig, the beautiful daughter of a country schoolmaster, forced to earn her living in the mills, forced to pay for the rest of her life for the mistake of loving the wrong man. And compelled in the end to make an extraordinary choice before she can be free.

Maggie Craig is a story of intense power and poignancy, a tale of passion and pride, of love, jealousy and human greed. But above all, it is the story of a woman of spirit fighting for her own identity and, ultimately, triumphing.