The novel explores the effect of the First World War on a married couple during the rise of Socialism and the Suffragette movement.
Described as 'a passionate assertion of the futility of war' by The Spectator, William - an Englishman won the first Prix Femina-Vie Heureuse Anglais prize in 1920.
[1][2] Curiously, though it has been perceived as anti-war, Hamilton's novel is actually an ardent and patriotic defense of the British war effort, with its most devastating critiques being against the home pacifist movement.
Ridiculing English pacifists as being “self-centered,” Hamilton accuses them of walking “the pathways of the paradise of fools,” and of being unwilling and unable to recognize the necessity of war when it came.
Though Tully does end up embittered against war in general, Hamilton never swerves from her dominant thesis that this disillusionment does not contradict the absolute rightness of the Allied war effort, a rightness justified by the implacable, inhuman menace of the German Empire.