Plot
The novels chronicle the life of Christopher Tietjens, "the last Tory", a brilliant government statistician from a wealthy landowning family who is serving in the British Army during World War I. Tietjens may or may not be the father of his wife's child, Sylvia, a flippant socialite who seems intent on ruining him. Meanwhile, Tietjens' incipient affair with Valentine Wannop, a high-spirited suffragette, has not been consummated, despite what all their friends believe. The two central novels follow Tietjens in the army in France and Belgium, as well as Sylvia and Valentine in their separate paths over the course of the war.
Read more about this topic: Parade's End
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Trade and the streets ensnare us,
Our bodies are weak and worn;
We plot and corrupt each other,
And we despoil the unborn.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)