Martha Quest is a young girl living on a farm in Africa, feeling her way through the torments of adolescence and early womanhood to marriage. She is a romantic idealist in revolt against the puritan snobbery of her parents, trying to live life to the full with every nerve, emotion and instinct bared to experience. For her, this is a time of solitary reading, daydreams, dancing, and the first disturbing encounters with sex.