Ellen Pascoe, a working class Cornish woman of 33, had endured a difficult childhood: first in her father's small cottage in a village near Land's End; then in St Ives where she had helped gut and clean the fish brought back by the fishing fleet, helped by her close childhood friend Susan Pengilly; and then, after her father's death, caring for her elderly grandmother in an isolated cottage on Bodmin Moor.

When Ellen secures a job as a live-in waitress at a hotel in Tintagel, and Derek unexpectedly finds a local market for his lobsters, the couple at last have sufficient funds, and they decide to marry later that year on Michaelmas Day.

One of the hotel's guests, an American academic, tells Ellen about Lyonesse and Tintagel's mythological past, and encourages her to read the romance of Tristram and Iseult.

Writing in The Rotarian in 1939, the reviewer William Lyon Phelps considered the author to have created out of Tristan and Iseult and the situation of two ignorant waitresses and a laborer a structure of ineffable grace.

[4] In 1946 the novel was adapted by Thomas Job as a Broadway play entitled Land's End, with Shirley Booth as Susan and Helen Craig as Ellen.