It is the sixth and final novel in the popular Mapp and Lucia series, about idle women in the 1920s and their struggle for social dominance over their small communities.
In this novel, Emmeline "Lucia" Lucas is named Mayor of Tilling, an appointment that inflates her already elevated sense of self-importance.
Lucia makes a social blunder when she announces that as the Mayor, she will no longer play cards for money, and she is challenged when Mapp introduces a female novelist into their circle.
Cynthia and Tony Reavell in E. F. Benson Remembered say that this is "an astonishing coincidence, because Lucia was about to become Mayor of Tilling in a new novel he had written but which hadn't yet been published.
"[3] In Frivolity Unbound, Robert F. Kiernan expresses concern that Lucia is not as powerful a figure as she is in the previous novels.