Tess of the Storm Country

Tessibel Skinner is a young woman in a squatter village on the coast, where she lives with her father, a local fisherman. Towering above the village is the estate of Elias Graves, a wealthy man who hopes to use his influence to remove these squatters from his land. When his lawyer is unable to so directly, he instead enacts a ban on net fishing, removing the livelihoods of many people in the village, including Tess and her father.