The book is based on Comyns's marriage to John Pemberton, which ended in 1935. In the bohemian London of the 1930s, Sophia Fairclough and her husband Charles are painters, twenty-one and newly married, and poor. Sophia has two babies and a pet newt, becomes a life model to support her family and starts an affair with an elderly art critic called Peregrine.[2][3] The book is substantially autobiographical, with only a small number of purely imaginary scenes.