The mother of 'Anna' in this novel dies in childbirth and she brought up by her father and a governess, in a remote Pyrenean village. When she is thirteen, her father shoots himself and she Is adopted by a rich, beautiful and ruthless aunt who stows her in a boarding school. She forms friendships at the school but her freedom is abruptly curtailed when the aunt forces her into a loveless marriage: she comes to detest her husband and bourgeois family but cannot break away and finds herself marooned with him in Burma, where the story climaxes.

The mother of 'Anna' in this novel dies in childbirth and she brought up by her father and a governess, in a remote Pyrenean village. When she is thirteen, her father shoots himself and she Is adopted by a rich, beautiful and ruthless aunt who stows her in a boarding school. She forms friendships at the school but her freedom is abruptly curtailed when the aunt forces her into a loveless marriage: she comes to detest her husband and bourgeois family but cannot break away and finds herself marooned with him in Burma, where the story climaxes.