Edward Upward's acclaimed and partly autobiographical novel was originally published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press in 1938. It relates the growing disillusionment of a politically-committed tutor who is attached to the household of a philistine and reactionary country gentleman. His revulsion at the behaviour of his employers and their friends leads him to the brink of madness, from which he is saved only by his resolve to contribute to the movement for social revolution.