This is not a romance in the modern sense of the word. There are no torn bodices, nor longing looks. The book was written at the tail end of the Romantic Period in Europe. It is rather a fanciful view of what a universe might look like should it contain only two dimensions. The story of flatland begins with a description of the world in two dimensions. People in this world have no concept of depth, only length and width. Nevertheless the world appears to be vertical because the rain simply falls from north to south, so that the houses, made in the shape of a pentagon, serve to keep the inhabitants dry. Fog is fairly common in this world and is one of the means of distinguishing the various inhabitants.