A woman must decide whether to give herself to the man she loves before he goes - and the book is the argument, conducted in the open, about what she owes to convention and what to herself. Victoria Cross was Annie Sophie Cory, born in Rawalpindi to an army family and determined to write what respectable women were not supposed to know; the reviewers called her indecent, which was the point.

Victoria Cross was the pseudonym of British author Annie Sophie Cory (1868-1952). She lived and wrote in England, publishing novels and short stories from the 1890s to the 1930s. Her novel To-Morrow? (1904) drew widespread attention for its depiction of female desire and unmarried motherhood.