Mary O'Neill is brought up in Ellan, loved and cared for by her invalid mother within a house dominated by hostile and cruel relations.

Before returning to Ellan, Mary again meets her childhood friend, Martin Conrad, who is aghast to hear that she is to marry Lord Raa, a known 'profligate and reprobate.'

Back in Ellan, Mary is troubled to meet the foppish Lord Raa, who is clear in his opinion that their marriage is an open arrangement for kudos and money.

Mary makes unsuccessful enquiries about getting a divorce and returns to find the house vacated of guests, as they have ominously gone off on a cruise when it was discovered that Martin was coming to visit.

Despite her best intentions and determined attempts at self-denial, she and Martin admit their love and, on the eve of his departure on another mission to the South Pole, she goes to him in his room.

However, Mary is recalled to her Catholic vows and sees that she cannot marry again, but she is put off telling Martin this when she discovers that she is terminally ill and without long to live.

Hall Caine first conceived of the idea for The Woman Thou Gavest Me in 1890 when his two sons visited him in Rome during his time working on The Eternal City.

'[5] The Outlook spoke of how in the novel 'melodramatic situations and turgid rhetoric are the rule'; 'the mixture of sentiment, high-flown language, and unnecessarily bold discussion of the marriage relation makes reading disagreeable and tedious.

However, despite the predominantly negative critical reception, and in part thanks to the furore surrounding the book, The Woman Thou Gavest Me became the seventh best-selling novel of 1913, selling over half a million copies before the end of the year.

Most marked were the positive personal reactions he received from female readers of the novel, apparently leading to the fact that even 'years later he was still getting letters from women asking how he knew so exactly how they felt.'.

"[4] Some of the relatively obvious Manx locations and identifiers include the following: The novel was adapted for film by Beulah Marie Dix and directed by Hugh Ford.

[11] Released on 8 June 1919 in the US, the film starred Katherine MacDonald as Mary MacNeill, Milton Sills as Martin Conrad, Jack Holt as Lord Raa and Fritzi Brunette as Alma.