The story is largely told from the viewpoint of Fleda Vetch, a keenly intelligent young woman of straitened circumstances who, shortly after becoming the intimate friend and companion of Mrs. Gereth, falls in love with Owen.

Widow Adela Gereth tells the sensitive and tasteful Fleda Vetch that she's afraid her son Owen (heir to the family home Poynton) will marry the coarse Mona Brigstock.

Mrs Gereth dreads the prospect of her painstakingly collected furniture and other art objects being given up to a philistine wife, while being left to live alone in Ricks, a small and coarsely designed cottage bequeathed to her.

And there are the usual touches of understated but much-appreciated humor, as when Mrs. Gereth throws one of the Brigstocks' tacky magazines out the door at Mona, and the coarse but athletic girl deftly snares it on the fly.

[citation needed] In 1970, the BBC produced a highly regarded 4-part television program based on the book, starring Gemma Jones and Ian Ogilvy.

In the 2004 Booker Prize–winning novel The Line of Beauty, written by Alan Hollinghurst, two of the main characters attempt to get financing for a film production of the story; this plot point is also included in the 2006 three-part BBC Two serial of the same name, adapted for television by Andrew Davies.

In the novel In a Summer Season by Elizabeth Taylor (novelist), the character of Kate Heron fondly recalls reading The Spoils of Poynton with her late husband and friends Charles and Dorothea.

In the novel Mystery by Peter Straub, the character of teacher Dennis Handley describes "...his greatest bookfinding coup, the discovery of a typed manuscript of 'The Spoils of Poynton'".