The novel stands as a major milestone in science-fiction literature, inspiring legions of subsequent writers and an endless array of hostile-alien scenarios.

Thedominant presence in the work however, is the narrator Aurora Leigh, as she develops her ideas on art, love, God, the "Woman Question," and society.

In the best room of a farm-house on the skirts of a village in the hills of Northern Massachusetts there sat one morning in August three people who were not strangers to the house but who had apparently assembled in the parlor as the place ...