In the 19th century, Britain sent out missionaries to help Christianise the world. They brought their wives with them, and in 1853, a boarding school for missionary children was built in London. Eliza was a missionary daughter who joined the school in 1855, aged seven. She was one of only two children expelled 'for great misconduct' from the school during the first fifty years of its existence. She was sent back to her parents in Mauritius when she was fourteen years old. She fell in love with a young missionary, Herbert, and they got married three years later. They spent some time in Madagascar and Mauritius before they were sent to Japan in 1874 to run the newly-opened mission in Nagasaki. Eleven children later, Eliza died in 1887. The rest is fiction.