 The Observations is set in Scotland in 1863 and narrated by the lively, sharp Bessy Buckley, who leaves her murky past in Glasgow and stumbles into a job as a maid at Castle Haivers, a large house outside Edinburgh.Arabella, her mistress, encourages Bessy to write her thoughts and experiences in a journal.She also subjects Bessy to odd experiments, but Bessy goes along with them because she is flattered by the attention and quickly grows attached to her mistress.