[1] The story involves the description of Olivia Curtis, a young woman, and her affair with a married man, Rollo Spencer, whom she knows through his sister Marigold and whom she meets again on a railway journey (after having met him, initially, years before at a ball).

Lehmann observed that the character Olivia was quite autobiographical (more so, for example, than Judith Earle in her debut novel, Dusty Answer).

[3] Stylistically, the novel uses techniques and forms that were pioneered by modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, with a fragmented narrative style building up a complex interiority that helps us to explore subjects that were relatively taboo during the 1930s such as female sexuality.

[4] Lehmann also employs the device of sharp shifts between first and third person narration which helps to manifest the complex emotional life experienced by Olivia and the way in which it interacts with the wider culture of the period.

It was directed by Don Homfray and Gavin Millar and starred Michael York, Lisa Eichhorn, and Joanna Lumley.