Mary Amelia St. Clair was a popular British author and suffragist, as well as a critic of poetry and prose. She was acquainted with Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Ford Madox Ford, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Rebecca West. She served as an ambulance driver in World War I, and produced poetry and fiction based on it. The term stream of consciousness in the literary sense is attributed to her.

The Tysons (originally titled Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson ) is a character study of a doomed marriage. Nevill Tyson is a man of humble birth and cosmopolitan education, whom inheritance thrusts into the unsuitable position of country gentleman, as he lacks interest in the country and gentle breeding. All might have been well save his marriage to Mollie Wilcox, who gossip says he met in a railway carriage. The closed and narrow society of Drayton Parva, Nevill’s inability to remain true to anyone, and the love of Nevill’s friend Stanistreet for Mollie will ultimately lead to tragedy.