Rose Allatini's novel of pacifism and forbidden feeling, prosecuted by the British government in 1918 and out of print for most of a century, with a new introduction on its suppression and on the woman its censors failed to see.
Antoinette de Courcy has spent her life falling in love with women, though nobody has explained to her that this is unusual. At thirteen it was Miss Prescot, the melancholy literature mistress the other girls made miserable. At fifteen it was Natasha, a Russian schoolfellow who understood that withdrawing her favour would keep Antoinette devoted. At twenty-three, at a hotel in Sussex, it is Hester Cawthorn, who carries a walking stick, keeps her hat low over a thin unhappy face, and warns her at their first real conversation that there is nothing to be had.
Also at the hotel is Dennis Blackwood, a young composer courted by every woman in the place and interested in none of them, who watches Antoinette rather closely for reasons she does not yet understand. When war is declared and Dennis refuses military service, Antoinette follows him into a position she barely understands and cannot afford to hold, and finds herself despised by nearly everyone she knows.
Allatini published the book under the name A. T. Fitzroy in May 1918. The circulating libraries banned it that month, the editor of a London weekly demanded a prosecution in September, and in October the court ordered every copy destroyed on the grounds that it discouraged enlistment.