A noblewoman addresses honorable ladies and delivers an extended first-person account of the anguishes produced by love, blending a dedicatory epistle with episodic narrative. She recounts her upbringing and early marriage, her beauty and the attention it draws, and the sorrow that follows her husband's absences and surrounding political troubles. Through rhetorical reflection and mythological allusion she explores constancy, temptation, fate, and the bodily and emotional costs of desire, alternately confessing suffering, warning other women against vain amour, and seeking consolation and moral perspective for her afflictions.