Jumping into the midst of a journey, in Prelude we find the Burnell family in a cart, removing their lives from town to a house in the Wellington countryside. Isolated but enduring, the family become rooted in the estate, caught between private passions and domestic mores, much like the aloe in the garden, which pierces these pages again and again.

United here are both Prelude, fêted by Virginia Woolf and published by her Hogarth Press, and the longer piece, The Aloe, which it inspired, leaving the reader to ponder on what lies between.