Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize 1957, At Lady Molly's is set in England of the mid-1930s and is essentially a comedy of manners, but in the background, the rise of Hitler and of worldwide Fascism are not ignored.

The driving theme of At Lady Molly's is married life; marriages – as practised or mooted – among the narrator's (Nick Jenkins) acquaintances in bohemian society and the landed classes are pondered.

A chance meeting by Nick with Quiggin (at a cinema where Man of Aran is showing) leads to a surprising and rather mysterious invitation of a weekend visit to the country.

"[3] Auberon Waugh took exception to this reflective style complaining of the number of clauses in some of Powell's sentences and attacking the use of "the diffident double-negative" as well as the "'elegant' or dissociative inverted comma."

He dismissed A Dance to the Music of Time, At Lady Molly's not excepted, with: "As an early upmarket soap opera, it undoubtedly gave comfort to a number of people, becoming something of a cult during the 1970s in the London community of expatriate Australians.

Norman Shrapnel, in making a comparative literary point, at the same time attacks the "soap opera" idea, with the judgement: "He [Powell] lacks what Amis and most of the later English humorists have possessed – sentimentality.

Living on, as Lovell surmised, about £100 a year of her own money with Jeavons not bringing in a cent[18] the Jeavonses' kept open house at their home at South Kensington, a social no-man's land[19] where one could meet all kinds[20] (excepting working class types unless they were employees).

Moreland composes, Barnby paints, X Trapnel writes, Quiggin, Members and Maclintick criticise and the narrator publishes books and then becomes a writer.

It's this creativity, together with the comedy of everyday life, that sustains the Dance"[3] Of the characters mentioned above, the narrator (Nick), Members—a poet as well as a critic, Quiggin and Barnby all appear or are quoted in At Lady Molly's.