THE STORY

When plain, outspoken Yorkshire schoolgirl Marjory Thompson immigrates with her rambunctious family to Canada in 1904, her parents are convinced that fortune waits in the flat farmland of Manitoba. Before long, the impatient Marjory realizes that her parents have got it all wrong: nothing but hard work, loneliness, and boredom lie before them.

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Desperate to escape, Marjory takes one rural teaching post after another, scrimping and saving, until she can afford to attend university. After graduation, she is employed as a high school principal, a rare feat for a woman in the 1930s.

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What comes next, at the dawn of the feminist age, is not deserved success but a single act of terrible judgment that will haunt Marjory for the rest of her life.

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Now a century later, great-granddaughter, Amy Boyes, searches for clues about Marjory’s past before memories fade and evidence is lost forever. From a derelict prairie homestead, to the horrors of Passchendaele, the deprivation of the Great Depression, the swinging ‘60s, and the internet age, the triumphs and follies of a remarkable woman and her descendants are explored in this fictionalized biography.

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With insight and imagination, Amy Boyes brings the past alive in “Yes, Miss Thompson,” a story of immigration, struggle, and the long reach of history.