The author's story is primarily and unabashedly a feminist text, for she took issue with many practices that contributed to or resulted in her feeling helpless and constrained simply because she was female. The work is also a sociological text that depicts the social conditions of an era and the dynamics of a particular society. All in all, it is an incredible eyewitness commentary describing life on a small Mediterranean island whose fortunes and misfortunes went hand-in-hand with those of the Venetian, Napoleonic, and British empires of which the island was a part.

Though we live in a different time and a different place, there is much within the author's writing which will strike the English reader as being both true and poignant.