1922. Vivien is twenty-four and a spinster. She wears fashionably droopy clothes, but she is plain and--almost worse--intelligent. At nearly six feet tall, she is known unkindly by her family as "the giantess." Fortunately, Vivien is rich, so she can travel to London and bribe a charismatic gentleman publisher to marry her. What he does not know is that Vivien is pregnant with another man's child and will die in childbirth in just a few months... Fay Weldon, with one eye on the present and one on the past, offers Vivien's fate, along with that of London between World War I and World War II. This is a city fizzing with change, full of flat-chested flappers, shell-shocked soldiers, and aristocrats clinging onto the past. Inventive, warm, playful, and full of Weldon's trademark ironic edge, Before the War is a spellbinding novel from one of the best writers of our time."