1928. Living a comfortable life with her New York newspaperman husband Charles Rawlings,
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, thus far unpublished, has always wanted to be a successful fiction writer, she believing the best way to achieve that goal being to focus on the Gothic romance genre, popular at the time. She also believes she needs to write without distraction, the reason she purchases, sight unseen, an orange grove property in the rural, isolated and very small community of Cross Creek, FL, which leads to her divorcing Charles in he not supporting her in that move. Her plan is to live off the proceeds of the grove while she writes. Nothing about living in Cross Creek on this property is as she expects, including that both the house and grove are in poor shape. She is initially suspect of the kindness of strangers, unaware that most just want the basics to better their lives. She finds that they are largely a poor and eccentric lot, at least in her sensibilities, including: her neighbors the Turners, their young teenage daughter, Ellie, who is raising a fawn she's named Flag against the wishes of her father, Marsh; a young black woman named Beatrice, nicknamed Geechee, who she hires as her maid and who has a complicated relationship with her "man" Leroy, incarcerated for manslaughter; and her primary grove hands, cousins Paul and Tim, both who live in the swampy forest and the latter who is primarily concerned with the health of his pregnant wife and their unborn child, their first child not surviving in their poverty. Hotelier
Norton Baskin, however, does have an agenda in his kindness in being interested in her romantically. Marjorie is determined to eke out a life here doing things she finds are just a matter of course in achieving that end. Her latest Gothic romance novel which she sends to her New York editor friend
Max Perkins, along with a detailed letter of her Cross Creek life, will be the impetus for her future writing, but not even remotely in the way she expects.
—Huggo