Esther Waters is born to parents in a Protestant movement called Plymouth Brethren in the Barnstaple borough of London. Her father dies and her mother remarries to a cruel tyrant of a man who forces beautiful Esther to work. Esther therefore stays illiterate instead of receiving any kind of education. At first she works as a kitchen help for the Barfields, a wealthy family who recently found extravagant wealth in their equestrian family business.
While working for the Barfields, Esther meets William Latch and the two consummate their attraction. Esther is then deeply disappointed to learn that Latch is also sleeping with the Barfield's niece. Latch picks the niece and Esther discovers she is pregnant. After a few months, she starts showing, and although she has a good relationship to her employer, she is released from the job for her bad example to the maidens. This means that Esther must return home to her abusive step-father, pregnant.
Instead, though, she finds a room to rent where she won't have to cross paths with the man. She delivers her baby in Queen Charlotte's hospital, and at the same time, her mother deliver's another sibling, the eighth child in the family, but she dies giving birth. Esther learns from her sister that the entire family will now move to Australia. It's the last time Esther sees anyone from her family ever again.
Esther becomes a wet nurse, leaving her baby, little Jack, with a baby farmer to go work as a nurse for a wealthy woman. The wealthy women never breast-feed their own baby. She is forbidden by her employer to touch her own child for fear of spreading an infection. When she finally returns to her own baby, she finds that his very life is in danger from his poor treatment. She quits without notice and leaves to a workhouse, without another recourse. She only stays in the house for a few months, though, and she meets Mrs. Lewish in East Dulwich who can adopt her child and raise him, and she goes back to work.
But even without the child, the work conditions are far too cruel for her, and when inevitably her health and safety are threatened by the work, she quits and starts all over again. She also loses jobs when people gossip about her bastard child. She is even fired for receiving a sexy letter from the son of one of her employer's, a letter which she cannot even read by the way, given that she is still illiterate.
Then one day she meets Miss Rice, an aspiring author. She works for her and meets Fred Parsons another Plymouth Brother, and a somewhat political figure in the community. This reversal of fortune continues. Esther finds her baby daddy again, and luckily, he's rich from his gambling, and he's divorcing that other girl because she cheated on him. The two finally get married, but the choice to leave the Parsons was tragic for Esther, because her new husband is a somewhat sleazy man with big goals, admittedly, but perhaps even his goals are too grand.
Jack is now a teenager in school, and Esther has enjoyed a few years of general well-being. She hires her own servant. Latch's gambling addiction is severe, so much so that he loses his bar license and has to pay a large fee to the police. His health declines into consumption. He gambles every penny of the family's money in one last game, and he loses his wife and child's only inheritance, and he dies.
By this time, Esther's options have run out again. She remembers the Barfield family and they take her on again. Jack is old enough to make a life for himself in London. Mrs. Barfield is the home's only inhabitant when Esther arrives, and Esther helps helps to repair the run-down estate. The two ladies become very close friends and they suddenly realize that they've been afforded the kind of loneliness and companionship they need to really practice their intimate religious beliefs without being held back by their circumstances. Jack serves in the army and then visits the women in Woodview, and that scene ends the novel.
