The book opens with works written under the pseudonym 'Brunette Coleman', including the two novellas, Trouble at Willow Gables and Michaelmas Term at St Bride's, and the poem sequence Sugar and Spice. The remainder of the volume is devoted to the unfinished drafts of two novels, No For An Answer and A New World Symphony, on which Larkin worked after the completion of A Girl in Winter. It ends with two short debats of 1950 and 1951, which pungently dramatise his sense of failure as a novelist and his rejection of marriage.