A small villa in the French countryside, lined with beech trees, a father and his two adult daughters: the elder is sickly, the younger is eighteen and full of life, with a bourgeois family portrait gallery on the walls. What appears to be so orderly on the outside becomes a hell on earth for Adrienne Mesurat. Tormented by her father and bullied by her sister, she falls in love with a man she knows only fleetingly, Dr. Maurecourt. An obsessive, fanatical love that remains unrequited. When her sister Germaine flees their father's house, Adrienne is left to face his tyranny alone. In a fit of blind rage, she pushes him down the stairs one night, leading to his death. The art of this novel, wrote Walter Benjamin, allows us to "look into the lacing of passion and reveals the simple, jagged machinery: loneliness, fear, hate, love, defiance.".