It is now 1810, the eighteenth-century is but a memory, the war with France, which has claimed hundreds of thousands of British lives and drained the national treasury, plows into its third decade, and in Cornwall, the tragically costly Warleggan-Poldark feud has "cooled to ashes."
In this segment of the series, the children of the aging but far from antiquated Ross and Demelza move onto center stage and it is as much on their lives as those of the now older generation that the plot focuses. Clowance Poldark, oldest surviving daughter of the Nampara household, and her older brother Jeremy, each become fixated upon love interests. Jeremy is infatuated with the gracefully elegant Cuby Trevanion, a young woman from an ancient but impoverished family of the gentry, while the normally sensible Clowance loses her heart to the title character of this volume, the mysterious Stephen Carrington, the "stranger from the sea."