According to the British Newspaper The Guardian, "Scott probably didn't know he was dying when he wrote "Staying On", and it does little good to speculate on whether intimations of mortality influenced him.

"[2] Staying On focuses on Tusker and Lucy Smalley, who were briefly mentioned in the latter two books of the Raj Quartet, The Towers of Silence and A Division of the Spoils.

She remembers how the young Captain Smalley came back to London on leave in 1930, visited his bank, where she, a vicar's daughter, worked, and tentatively asked her out.

It falls to Lucy to navigate a path between her husband's obstinacy and obtuseness and the increasingly pressing demands of India's slow transition to modernity.

It is through a letter from Sarah Perron that romantic fans of the Raj Quartet learn that she did indeed meet Guy again, and they are living happily ever after with their two children, Lance and Jane.

It is clear she blames Tusker for insisting on 'staying on'—at one point they could have retired comfortably to England, but he has been reckless ("nothing goes quicker than hundred rupee notes"), and now she has no idea if they could afford it.

She is a survivor, because she can adapt, as is shown by the fact that, on the day of Tusker's death, she was about to break a previously upheld taboo and welcome her hairdresser, Susy, who is of mixed race, to dinner.

It is often regarded as a delightful conclusion to Scott's Raj Quartet series, offering a unique and engrossing portrait of the end of an empire and a forty-year love affair.

In 1980, the book was turned into a television film of same title produced by Granada TV and starrs Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson.