This dramatic novella is split into two parts. In the first, a young woman of 'New Woman' convictions, identifiable with the author herself, makes a train journey to conservative connections in the country. On board the train she encounters the spirited niece of this family who has been looked after by them while her parents are away, but who well understands their limitations. Adalesa Shutt is determined, energetic, critically thoughtful and shares the narrator's opinions about the equality of women.

The daughter of the house, Evangeline Marsh, is Adalesa's cousin and the narrator's schoolmate. Both of them recognize a different type in Evangeline - someone dedicated to the pleasing of men and the pursuit of beauty for its own sake, as a necessary womanly art. She and her formidable mother, Lady Marsh, find the narrator and Adalesa to be hopelessly mistaken with regard to what is important in life. A ball that the three young women hold brings boiling to the surface their differences, and events there prove to have crucial consequences for their further lives.

The second part occurs many years later. The narrator and Adalesa again return to the Marshes' home at the same time, in a strange echo of the previous visit so long ago. How will the now elderly Lady Marsh and middle-aged Evangeline receive them? Will a ball the three women again plan to hold together revive old feelings? How will each of their approaches to life have determined their outcomes? In one case in particular, the answers to these questions are devastating.

With delightful wit and lyrical colour, leading into profound tragedy, Sarah Grand takes us on a journey into the significant pressures on women in her time. On serial publication in 1893, the crisis at the end of The Yellow Leaf was criticized by contemporary reviewers as improbable; Grand felt herself obliged to reveal that the climactic events in question, and the reasons for them, were taken from real life, illustrating perfectly that, sometimes, truth is more powerful than fiction.