At the close of the Second World War, Sir Harry and Lady Waring gave permission to their niece, Leslie Winter, and her husband, Philip, to turn Beliers Priory - its service as a military hospital complete - into a preparatory school for boys. Two years later, as the plot of Love Among the Ruins begins to turn, the Priory School is flourishing. A cast of characters quickly gathers around the Winters: Charles Belton, newly-hired school master at the Priory School, and his elder brother, Captain Freddy Belton of the Royal Navy; Susan Dean, the Red Cross Depot Librarian and her sister, Jessica, an actress in thrall to the theatre; Lucy Marling, and her brother Oliver. The social order, no less than its political and economic counterparts, has been ravaged by the domestic tensions of the war. It, too, is in ruins, and the behavior of the young men and women is both bewildered and bewildering - a situation ripe with comic possibilities.