After a change in family fortunes the eponymous Young Anne is determined to gain her independence. "I must be able to keep myself. Have I got to keep being taken in by someone all my life?". Acquisition of shorthand and typing skills enables her to earn her first £4 pay packet; Dorothy Whipple's depiction of the fusty, bureaucratic, male-dominated Municipal Offices is taken from her own experience of the working environment of "pitch-pine, dirty windows, ledgers, letter-presses, ink and india-rubbers".