Born into an unhappy marriage, Mary Hansyke spends much of her childhood at the house of her uncle, Mark Henry Garton, a shipbuilder whose business dominates the small coastal town of Danesacre. Mary develops a fascination with the world upon which her uncle's house looks down, and swears that when she is old enough she too will build ships... Mary's dreams are shattered when, at the age of fifteen, her father gives her in marriage to Archie Roxby, an old friend of his some forty years her senior. Mary is horrified by the reality of her marriage, which is, however, short-lived: two years later, a widow with a small son, Richard, Mary returns to her uncle and demands a place in his business.

Part admiring, part determined to teach her a lesson, Mark Henry places Mary in a thankless apprentice's position. Nevertheless, Mary perseveres, setting herself to learn everything she can of the business; and when Mark Henry dies in the wake of an operation, it is discovered that in spite of her youth and inexperience, he has left Garton's in its entirety to his niece. For nearly twenty years, though beset by doubters and gossip, Mary holds hard to her position, trying to balance her passion for Garton's and its ships with her relationships with two men: Hugh Hervey, her second husband, who she loves, but not enough to give up Garton's; and Gerry Hardman, for whom she would give up everything, if only he would accept her sacrifice...

Storm Jameson was herself born into a Yorkshire shipbuilding family, and her background is evident in every detailed page of The Lovely Ship, the first work in a trilogy known as "The Triumph Of Time". Here we follow Mary Hansyke from her ill-starred birth in 1841, to her first exposure to the world of Garton's and the stirrings of a passion that will ultimately dominate her life, to her ascension to power; witnessing all her triumphs and her failures across the years, as sail gives way to iron and then to steel, as the opening of the Suez Canal changes shipping forever, and as the economic boom of the 1860s collapses into the hard times of the 1870s. Mary is not always the most likeable of heroines: her determination is too often obstinacy, her passions too possessive; she neglects her daughters while building her life about her son; and she sees her workers only as a resource to be exploited, shying away from the squalor and poverty behind the prosperity of the business owners.

Even so, there is something admirable about the indomitable willpower that carries Mary through industrial upheaval and economic crises, and Garton's with her. And although Mary's first love is always her business, over time two very different men threaten its preeminence. Hugh Hervey, young, handsome and a gentleman, is at first a husband and lover out of Mary's dreams; but their marriage founders first upon her inability to give herself to him wholeheartedly, and finally upon his infidelity. Surviving this, Mary is yet unprepared for the emotion that is unleashed by the re-entry into her life of her first, childish love, Gerry Hardman - no longer a passionate boy but a world-weary man beaten down by life and, like Mary, caught in a loveless marriage. In Gerry's sheer need of her Mary finds a deeper satisfaction than she has ever known, but their situation means that they can only be together by cutting every tie that binds them - which in Mary's case means giving up both her beloved son, and Garton's itself...