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Intro
Bernard, Susan, Neville, Louis, Rhoda, and Jinny spend their childhood together living in a house by the sea under the tutelage of Miss Hudson and the care of Mrs. Constable and Miss Curry. One day in the garden, while Rhoda plays with petals in a basin and Bernard and Neville carve ships out of wood, Jinny finds Louis hiding among the bushes. She kisses him, making Susan jealous. When Susan runs out of the garden, Bernard chases her and tries to encourage her to rejoin the others. Later, while the rest of the children take a walk, sickly Neville stays at the house, ruminating on the meaning of death.
When they’re old enough to attend primary school, the children leave the house for gender-segregated boarding schools. Bernard, Louis, and Neville attend a boys’ school under the direction of Dr. Crane. There, they meet their friend Percival, a magnificent boy whom everyone seems to love and respect. At the girls’ school, under the watchful eye of Miss Lambert, Jinny longs to become a woman so she can go to parties; Susan suffers from intense homesickness for the countryside where she grew up, and Rhoda feels increasingly isolated from humanity.
Louis, the son of an Australian banker, doesn’t have the resources to go to college, so he embarks on a business career when his primary schooling is finished. Bernard and Neville attend college together. The girls go to finishing school abroad. Bernard proposes to Susan, but she turns him down because she wants to marry a farmer.
In their 20s, the seven friends gather to bid Percival—who is going to India—goodbye. Bernard has just gotten engaged and is excited about his future. Neville, who loves Percival, feels bereft. Jinny enjoys her career as an attractive socialite.
A little while later, on the same day Bernard’s first child is born, word reaches the friends that Percival has died in a horse-riding accident. They each mourn his passing. Soon afterward, Bernard visits each one in turn. In subsequent years, Susan has many children; Louis becomes a successful businessman; Louis and Rhoda briefly become lovers; Neville has a string of intense but brief romantic relationships; and Bernard sinks comfortably into a conventional lifestyle.
The friends meet again on the brink of middle age. At first, they’re awkward together because their lives have taken such different paths. Eventually, they fall back into their old intimacy, although they can’t hold onto that feeling for long anymore.
Finally, many years later, Bernard tells the friends’ life stories to a near-stranger in a restaurant. By now, Susan and Rhoda have died (Rhoda by suicide). Louis and Neville are both successful, although both remain intensely lonely. Although he’s never written the book he spent his life gathering material for, after many years, Bernard has developed keen insight into his friends’ lives and into his own soul. He expresses enduring love for his friends (including Percival), without whom he would not know who he is or how to function in the world. And he faces death with equanimity, secure in the knowledge that there is an underlying order to the world and confident in the cycles of life and death.
