Fran: From Whitby to the Wild Yorkshire Moors - Joy Smith

The magnificence of the scene and the silence, broken only by the sound of gulls in the distance, was to her imaginative mind justification for her decision to work there. The apprehension which she'd experienced was replaced with delight. And there, amid such glory, she saw a single-storey stone construction that nestled so firmly amongst the rocks and barren earth that it appeared to be part of the landscape: Howdale School.

When young schoolteacher Fran Booth steps from the train at Fyling Hall Station in 1899, her life is about to change in ways she could never have imagined.

As a town girl from Whitby, she faces a cultural clash between her aspirational middle-class family and the fiercely proud, independent inhabitants of the wild North Yorkshire Moors.

Fran: From Whitby to the Wild Yorkshire Moors is a meticulously researched historical account of real people - their strengths and weaknesses, prejudices and foibles - set against a backdrop of a beautiful, but challenging and remote, northern landscape.

Fran's remarkable story sheds new light on the lives of ordinary people during the tumultuous period between the start of the twentieth century and the end of the First World War, many of whom the author knew personally.