Written in 1854-55 and translated after 140 years into English, this is the one and only novel written by a daughter of one of Norway's best-known literary families. Camilla Collett had felt her creativity stifled and her literary ambitions thwarted by society's conventional expectations of what a woman could properly achieve; it was not until she was a widow of 42 that she could finally finish her novel, which she called 'my life's long-suppressed scream'.

In an intricate study of relationships, the novel creates a bourgeois society reminiscent of Jane Austen, in which marriage is the only respectable career for a woman. Sophie, the youngest of four daughters of a cynical and disappointed mother, struggles against society's precepts and her own conditioning to be allowed to make an independent choice; but all her surroundings can offer her by way of models are disillusioned wives, lonely spinsters or crazy old maids.