Through the vibrant years of the early part of the century - from 1896 to 1919 - lived the Whitmans, the Pritchards and the Dances, whose lives were destined to be intertwined... Jonathan Whitman, his cousin Myra, Anne Louise Pritchard and the enormous Pritchard clan to which she belonged, saw the changing era and the incredible events of a passing age - an age of great poverty and great wealth, of the Boer War and social reform, of straw boaters, feather boas and the music hall. Throughout all of this is the story of one woman's consuming love and of a jealous obsession that threatened to destroy the very man she adored...