chunk: The novel begins with the Madden sisters and their childhood friend in Clevedon. After various travails, the adult Alice and Virginia Madden move to London and renew their friendship with Rhoda, an unmarried bluestocking. She is living with the also unmarried Mary Barfoot, and together they run an establishment teaching secretarial skills to young middle-class women remaindered in the marriage equation.
  Monica Madden, the youngest and prettiest sister, is living-in above a shop in London. She is, in modern parlance, "stalked" by a middle-aged bachelor Edmund Widdowson, and he eventually brow-beats her into marriage. His ardent love turns into jealous obsession suffocating Monica's life.