She was too restless to work or write. She thought of Richard, of her unmanageable desires and her un-abatable ambitions... `My life is in pieces, I am nothing, I have achieved nothing; yet I will, she thought'. In the month after the 1918 Armistice a young woman, Hervey Russell, comes to London to seek her fortune. Inexperienced and poor, she has all the strength and stubborn will of her Yorkshire grandmother and all the dreams of youth. Hervey is alone, her husband in the Air Force still, her baby son in Yorkshire. She plunges into the social and political ferment of London life with her friends T.S. and Philip, her slovenly, amicable neighbour Delia, and her lover, the American Jess Gage. This is the beginning of Hervey's story...

Storm Jameson (1891- 1986) born to a North Yorkshire family of shipbuilders. Jameson's fiery mother, who bore three girls, encouraged Storm (christened Margaret Storm) to pursue an academic education. After being taught privately and at Scarborough municipal school she won one of three county scholarships which enabled her to read English Literature at Leeds University. She then went on to complete an MA in European Drama at King's College London. During her career Jameson wrote forty-five novels, numerous pamphlets, essays, and reviews, in an effort to make money. Her personal life suffered, and her first marriage to schoolmaster Charles Douglas Clarke was an unhappy one. After they divorced in 1925, Jameson went on to marry Guy Chapman, a fellow author, and remained with him despite her apparent rejection of normal domestic life. Storm Jameson was always politically active, helping to publish a Marxist journal in the British section of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers in 1934 and attending anti-fascist rallies.