Anthony Beavis is a man inclined to recoil from life. His past is haunted by the death of his best friend Brian and by his entanglement with the manipulative Mary Amberley. Realising that his determined detachment from the world has been motivated not by intellectual honesty but by moral cowardice, Anthony attempts to find a new way to live.

In 1786, when he was already the acknowledged leader of the Sturm und Drang literary movement, Goethe set out on a journey to Italy to fulfil a personal and artistic quest and to find relief from his responsibilities and the agonies of unrequited love. As he travelled to Venice, Rome, Naples and Sicily he wrote many letters, which he later used as the basis for the Italian Journey. A journal full

Continuing where The Rainbow left off, this novel looks at the third generation of the Brangwens: Ursula, now a teacher, and her sister Gudrun, who has returned from an art school. It focuses on their relationships, Ursula's with Rupert Birkin, a school inspector, and Gudrun's with Gerald, an industrialist, and later with a sculptor, Loerke.