Venetia

Venetia Lanyon has spent her life at Undershaw, the family seat in Yorkshire, in the country and away from the world, because her father was reclusive and kept her there. Her only company has been her younger brother Aubrey, a scholarly young man with a diseased hip who is studying for a fellowship.

The quiet of the house is broken by Lord Damerel, a rake who takes up residence at his family's house next door to the Lanyons. Venetia keeps out of his way to begin with, but when Damerel finds the injured Aubrey, takes him into his house to recover and then becomes a friend to the awkward young man, she changes her mind about him and the two of them become friends.

The pair fall in love, and at that point Damerel refuses to marry her, convinced that a man with his reputation would ruin her socially. Matters at home are not helped by the arrival of the wife and mother-in-law of her older brother, of whom the family had not been told, and Venetia is invited to London for a season with an aunt and uncle both to escape the awkwardness and to look for a husband. While she is there she learns, by chance, that her mother, long given out to be dead, is in fact alive, and had gone off with someone else when the children were babies.

Venetia works out for herself what her relatives' over-protectiveness has been about, and the novel is as much concerned with her reading of her own situation as with the courtship at the centre of it.