It follows an emotionally immature woman's hasty marriage to an unsuccessful farmer, and her ensuing mental deterioration, her murder, and the colonial British society's reactions to it.

The novel begins with a newspaper clipping about the death of Mary Turner, a white woman, killed by her black servant, Moses.

But, after overhearing her friends laugh at her as sexless and immature, she resolves to marry, and when Dick Turner asks her she consents, though she has met him only twice.

From the beginning, they are distant and cold, but, except when Mary briefly runs away, fear of loneliness and lack of money keep them together.

When Mary becomes involved in the running of the farm, she realizes that its failure is not down to bad luck, as Dick keeps telling her, but his incompetence.

Fifteen lines from this section of The Waste Land are quoted to begin the novel, forming its epigraph, to which is added the epigrammatic quotation: "It is by the failures and misfits of a civilization that one can best judge its weaknesses", an aphorism from an unstated source.