Storm Passage's Alice Anne is a heroine very much in the mold of other Hilton protagonists. Highly intelligent, headstrong, practical, unsentimental, and acutely self-aware that she is "out of sync" with the people and circumstances of her life. She strains for an opportunity for change, striving to induce psychological order by an organizing mania for her immediate physical surroundings; living like an emotionless automaton.

"She did not understand love ... she quite believed that it would one day afflict her, just as she quite believed that she would one day die and be buried”. When love does arrive in the guise of a wandering artist, Alice finds how quickly control over her own destiny can end. Succumbing to passion nearly always ends in disaster or some life-changing event in Hilton's fictional world, and such is the case in Storm Passage. When she meets, by chance, the amoral, brilliant, con artist John Wilson, Alice Anne finds an almost inscrutable "immovable object."

James Hilton wrote voluminously for various media. To date, none of his early newspaper work has been collected, nor the bulk of his short stories, poems, essays, or book reviews. As his popularity peaked, many of his early titles were resurrected, some retitled, and at least one severely shortened for its U.S. debut. There is evidence of other manuscripts in various stages of completion that remain unpublished.