Hope Mirrlees dedicated The Counterplot to Jane Harrison, with a Greek epigram taken from Homer's Odyssey, which translates to "nothing is greater than when two people keep house together, man and wife, a great grief to enemies and joy to friends.

[2] The novel's protagonist is Teresa Lane, a woman of 28, living in Plasencia, a villa in the southeast of England, shortly after World War I, who studies the spectacle of her family life with the intent of transforming it into art.

The result is a play, The Key, written by Teresa after the style of the Spanish autos sacramentales and set in Seville during the reign of Pedro the Cruel, the text of which is reproduced in its entirety within chapter eleven.

"[4] In a brief review of the work, The Nation compared Mirrlees' writing style for this novel to Walter Pater as well as Thomas Browne and Joris-Karl Huysmans.

[9] In a diary entry dated 24 March 1955, writer Christopher Isherwood wrote that The Counterplot has "been one of the truly 'formative' books in my life", further writing that he knew "whole passages of it nearly by heart.