This is a memoir of Emma Tennant's life, as a girl and then her years from eighteen to thirty, which is also a memoir of the Fifties and Sixties, a memoir of the times.
It opens with her Coming-Out Ball, where we find her wondering what on earth she is supposed to do in life. Marriage seems the only option . . . Yet this girl escapes - at first - in her search for a system which will change the world, and enable her to find her own identity. But, like a modern Donna Quixote tilting at windmills, she falls into adversity, as well as numerous marriages along the way. The worlds of gambling, satire and revolution first welcome and then repel the hapless traveller through the changing times, from Fifties Boom to Sixties Lust.
This is the story of what it was, in those golden and reprehensible days, to be a girl.
