A Miss Pauline Marchrose applies for the position of "Lady Superintendent" at the Commercial and Technical College for South West England, where Sir Julian Rossiter is the college director. He is greatly impressed by her and soon this admiration turns to adoration. But his wife, Lady Edna Rossiter, discovers that Marchrose was the very same woman who jilted her cousin Clarence after he was paralysed in an accident. She starts a whispering campaign against her, without even trying to find out more about Marchrose’s motives and the peace of the local community is shattered by the ensuing tension.
E. M. Delafield was the pen name of Edmée Elizabeth Monica Dashwood, née de la Pasture (1890-1943). She was a British author from Sussex and the daughter of a count and a novelist. Delafield was raised following Late Victorian upper class morals, and when at age 21 she found herself still single, she joined a French covenant in Belgium. But she soon tired of being a nun and left monastery life behind. During WWI, she volunteered as a nurse in Exeter. In 1919, she married civil engineer turned land agent Paul Dashwood, with whom she spent three years in Malaysia. She remains most famous today for her semi-autobiographical "Diary of a Provincial Lady," which had started as a column in the weekly woman’s magazine "Time and Tide."