Having been raised with a passive, sickly mother and an intemperate, gambling addict father, Charles, now 26 and in receipt of a large inheritance from an uncle, has assumed the role of the adult in the household.

With Charles encouraged in domestic tyranny by his narrow-minded and spiteful fiancée Eugenia Wraxton and her tale-bearing brother Alfred, Sophy and her cousin begin a battle of wills.

Soon after her arrival, Sophy realizes that all is not well in the Rivenhall household and proceeds to solve the various problems of the family with her trademark flair, saving her cousin Hubert from a rapacious moneylender, arranging through an involved scheme her cousin Cecilia's extraction from her infatuation with (and later engagement to) the handsome but talentless poet, Augustus Fawnhope, and promoting her marriage to the eligible Lord Charlbury, the man favoured by her brother and parents and, ultimately, the man Cecilia discovers she loves.

By dint of shooting Charlbury and giving him a flesh wound, the romantic sight of his lordship with his arm in a sling brings Cecilia to acknowledge her love for him, whereupon Fawnhope magnanimously relinquishes her into his care.

Brompton has caught a cold and huddles by the fireside with his feet in a mustard bath, tended by Eugenia, who furiously renounces Charles when he ventures to criticize her conduct.

Its heroine is quick to punish the snobbish Miss Wraxton by scandalously driving her unescorted on an open phaeton past the male haunts of Pall Mall.

"[11] Patrick Thursfield, in The Times Literary Supplement, goes to the contemporary model of Jane Austen and compares Sophy to Emma Woodhouse for her match-making, although the former is "more successful and enterprising".