After spending much of her youth caring for her father and an invalid brother and having scarcely any independent life of her own, thirty-five-year-old Margaret Mackenzie inherits a substantial fortune after her brother’s death and moves with her niece Susanna to Littlebath, where she enters society for the first time and encounters the strict religious circle of the Stumfolds, the more independent Miss Todd, and a variety of people who force her to consider what kind of woman she wishes to become and where she belongs, while three very different men?Walter Rubb Junior, her cousin John Ball, and the clergyman Mr Maguire?begin to court her and place marriage unexpectedly at the center of a life that has previously been devoted almost entirely to duty, yet Margaret gradually becomes uneasy about the extent to which affection and money are intertwined in these proposals and hesitates to accept any of them, especially as family troubles draw her back to the bedside of her dying brother Tom, until she symbolically abandons some of her romantic expectations by tearing up the verses connected with her courtship and steps away from her suitors in order to reconsider what she truly wants from her newly independent life.