As a miserly farmer's wife, Jane Carter faces a grim future, until her daughter awakens her hope

It is the early 1900s in the mountains of Upstate New York where miners eke out a dangerous living. In order to save Jane from such a lifestyle, her family forces her into a marriage with Amos, a farmer ten years her senior. Amos has one goal, to expand his farm, and Jane's role is to give him children who can serve as free farmhands. But Jane, who wasn't able to speak up for herself as a fifteen-year old girl, wants more for her children.

Though Amos staunchly believes school is a waste of time, their daughter Eunie goes and begins to learn more about the world beyond the four walls of the cramped shanty the family lives in. She brings her discoveries home to Jane: women got the right to vote, they drive motor cars, they have opinions that they can openly vocalize. Jane's constrained and drab existence without any means of escape from her husband's demands is in sharp contrast to the future that her educated daughter will have.

The Liberation of Jane Carter is filled with heartbreaking loss offset by the hope Jane's daughter presents. It's enough. Jane's own liberation is hard-won when it eventually comes, the reader rooting for her every step of the way.