This marvelous book is the sequel to Bellamy's Looking Backward, his utopian novel of several years earlier, where a young man falls asleep in 1887 and wakes in a utopian year 2000, where all social ills are solved.
A young, beautiful woman with a shiny future ahead of her falls seriously ill. It takes her a long time to recover, and when she does, the illness has taken such a toll on her physically and mentally that she is hardly the same person any more. Her beauty is gone, her colours are faded, and all she wants now is to remember her past self with the happiness of her former life.