This is not the only one of Alec Waugh's novels in which he has described the agonies of a couple who are desperately in love but cannot marry, for it is a situation that he has himself lived through. But it is in this novel that he has drawn most specifically upon experiences he has only alluded to in other books.
His protagonist is Gordon Carruthers, who was also the hero of The Loom of Youth, that then shocking and revelatory novel...