Katherine has been studying piano herself, doing a little professional acting, and living with "Aunt Manya", a family friend known to the rest of the world as Madame Sergeivna, a famous actress on the Broadway stage.

She also learns to get along better with her peers after the arrival of Sarah Courmont, a girl she previously met briefly on her seventh birthday in New York; the two begin to form an intense friendship.

After suffering through the rest of school without Justin or the Sarah she once knew and a brief romance with Charles Bejart, a young physician and Manya's adopted son, Katherine returns to New York.

There she studies with her mother's old teacher, whose style is extremely intense and different from Justin's, shares an apartment with Sarah, who is now an actress, and becomes engaged to Pete, who used to help look after Katherine at Manya's theater.

Philippa "Flip" Hunter, the protagonist of And Both Were Young (1949) is another aspiring artist who attends a boarding school in Switzerland, initially fails to get on well with peers, and has trouble with an athletics instructor over a leg problem caused by a past injury.

Dedicated to L'Engle's father, Charles Wadsworth Camp (as is The Small Rain), Prelude covers the events of Katherine's life until Justin leaves the boarding school.

By contrast, the same scene in The Small Rain ends with the words, "She...sat there until she saw Justin leave the studio, carrying the music he hadn't already packed, walking happily, he head held high and proud, out of her life."

This current edition, ISBN 0-374-26637-9, features a dust jacket by Sam Salant and a new introduction by L'Engle, in which she mentions the continuation of Katherine's story in her 1982 novel A Severed Wasp.

He eventually confesses to having experimented with homosexuality and dissolute behavior as a young man, and it is implied there is an unrequited sexual component to his love for the present bishop, Allie Undercroft.

Katherine Forrester Vigneras appears very briefly in L'Engle's 1980 novel A Ring of Endless Light, playing a recital that Vicky Austin and Zachary Gray attend.