Romantic

Charlotte Redhead is a young British secretary trapped in a degrading affair with her married employer. When she breaks free, she doesn't seek freedom, she seeks a new romance. She meets John Conway, a handsome young Bohemian, and together they construct something they believe is purer: a platonic partnership born of shared idealism. When the Great War erupts, they rush to Belgium to run a volunteer ambulance corps, swept up in the romance of sacrifice and adventure. But Sinclair systematically dismantles their illusions. The competing ambulance crews turn vicious, each jockeying for glory while real suffering goes unnoticed. And Charlotte and Conway themselves begin to crack under the weight of their own romantic delusions, revealing the frightened, petty, all-too-human selves beneath the heroic narratives they've constructed. Sinclair, who actually drove ambulances in Belgium during the war, wrote this as an indictment of her own thrill-seeking past. The novel endures because it names something we still do: reach for the dramatic story to avoid sitting with what we actually feel.