Robert Lindores never expected to be an earl. He had lived cheaply abroad with his family until a chain of deaths brought him, unlooked-for, to the title and estates of Lindores in Scotland. The family comes home to their new greatness — and ambition, long held down by poverty, takes hold of the once-easygoing father. He means his house to rise, and he means his children to be the instruments of its rising.

His elder daughter, Lady Caroline — Carry — pays first. She had loved a young man of no fortune; when the earldom came, that attachment was quietly suppressed, and she was married instead to Pat Torrance of Tinto, a coarse, domineering, fabulously wealthy laird whose money buys the alliance her father craves. The marriage is a daily misery — Torrance brutal and possessive, Carry shut up with a man she cannot love, sacrificed to rank and to her father's design. Around her move the watchful Countess, the status-conscious heir Lord Rintoul, and the younger daughter Edith, clear-sighted and unwilling, courted by the steady John Erskine even as her father schemes to marry her where it will profit the house.

Then Torrance goes over a precipice near Tinto, in circumstances never wholly clear — accident, or something darker — and the death that frees Carry throws the family's fortunes and consciences into turmoil. What ought to be deliverance brings its own reckoning.

Published in 1883, The Ladies Lindores is one of Margaret Oliphant's finest achievements: a clear-eyed study in psychological realism of a woman trapped in a loveless, oppressive marriage, of a father's ambition and the daughter who pays its cost, and of the workings of money and rank in a Scottish county. Quiet, unsparing, and deeply humane, it belongs beside the great Victorian novels of marriage — Eliot's Middlemarch and James's The Portrait of a Lady — as a serious reckoning with a woman's lot.