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.