Set in Moscow in 1913, it tells the story of a Moscow-born English-educated print shop owner whose English wife has suddenly abandoned him and their three children.

Then, Mrs Graham, wife of the Anglican chaplain, introduces him to Muriel Kinsman, an English governess who has for reasons that are unclear recently been dismissed from her post.

Frank's chief accountant Selwyn Crane is an idealistic follower of Tolstoy who spends much of his spare time seeking out those he considers to be oppressed; he is also a poet and author of Birch Tree Thoughts.

Selwyn introduces Frank to Lisa Ivanovna, a young shop-girl found weeping at the men's handkerchief department of the local store.

[2] In the early 1970s, as part of her research on Edward Burne-Jones, Fitzgerald became friends with a Swiss art curator, Mary Chamot, who had been brought up in pre-revolution Russia.

[3] Later, Fitzgerald considered Nellie and Lisa, but her editor did not approve and suggested The Coming of Spring instead, an idea that the author modified for the published title.

[6] The scene is set within an anthropomorphized city of Moscow with corrupt bureaucracy, dilapidated buildings, and a climate that is cold and grey for much of the year.

[6] But there is also charm in the ramshackle wooden houses and their overgrown gardens; the city is filled with testaments to a glorious past, and the population meets the banality of everyday life with humour and passion.

[8] She liked creating a feeling of strangeness in a world of images, fragments, moments, and of things not said – a characteristic that her biographer Hermione Lee compared with Turgenev.

[2] Via the character of Selwyn, the background presence of Tolstoy is strongly felt within the novel, along with his spiritual epic Resurrection and its opening outburst of spring.

[10] The scene in the birch woods, forming part of the oddness and the beauty of the novel, is not explained within the text[11] and seems intentionally ambiguous.

[11] Fitzgerald's biographer, however, has stated that her working notes make it clear that the girl was not dreaming but has witnessed a gathering of revolutionary conspirators.

"[15] Anita Brookner was impressed by the author's "calm confidence behind the apparent simplicity of utterance", called her "the mistress of the hint of the sublime",[14] and praised the astonishing virtuosity with which she "mastered a city, a landscape, and a vanished time".

[16] The Daily Telegraph considered the work "marvellous, intelligent and beautifully crafted", The Times Literary Supplement "one of the outstanding novels of the year", The Guardian "a complete success", and the London Review of Books "a tour de force".