The title poem, a daring and innovative work for its day, adapts the sonnet sequence tradition (though in poems of sixteen lines) to the emotional realities of a failed contemporary marriage, tracing the course of estrangement as love gives way to discord, jealousy, unhappiness, and suicide. It draws on the blunder of Meredith's own first marriage, to the widowed daughter of Thomas Love Peacock, who fell in love with painter Henry Wallis and went off with him to Capri, returning afterwards to Weybridge where she died in 1861.