Neville Bendish is left aimless after fulfilling her role as a loving wife and mother of two children. After celebrating her forty-third birthday, she decides to enroll at a university to realize her dream of earning a medical degree, both as a way to leave behind the confines of her home and to use her knowledge and talents before they start to deteriorate with each passing year.

Neville’s story also allows the reader to take a glimpse into the lives of Mrs. Hilary, Neville’s widowed mother who is coasting through life doing housework and helping the local parish; Neville’s sister Nan, a writer who thinks of settling down with her friend Barry Briscoe, but hasn’t found the courage to accept his offer; and Neville’s daughter Gerda, a young rebel that has found refuge in idealism and opposing traditional societal values, but who also has fallen in love with a man who holds a worldview that runs contrary to her own.

In Dangerous Ages , Rose Macaulay provides a satirical look at societal norms, psychoanalysis, love, and gender roles in the 1920s through the eyes of four generations of women in the Bendish family. Each one questions the mundane nature of their shared home life, and how their respective goals, frustrations, and means to achieve happiness gradually change depending on their priorities, the stages of life they’re in, and the expectations associated with the positions they hold in their family units, and in society in general.