Maria Legassick is the youngest of the three daughters of a Cornish vicar, and she tells here the story of what happened, in a swiftly-changing world, to herself, her sisters, and her brilliant, gifted brother—Roger whom she loved too well; Louisa whom she admired but could never love; Bella whom she more and more despised. The book opens as an idyll in a beautiful part of Cornwall, with the vicarage looking out upon the sea, the stern old isolated father writing away for ever at ecclesiastical books that no one read; Roger dreaming of a career in scholarship; Louisa impatient, passionate, eager to be away and at work in a world she wants to change; Bella slothful and asking of life nothing but its unmindful satisfactions; in the background a chorus of rustics, including the sexton Thomas May, one of those Howard Spring characters who go to the heart. Maria is the observer who outlives them all.