Exactly how steamy is this story?
PG
Well, sex definitely happens in Where Angels Fear to Tread, but we don't get to read about it first-hand. At the beginning of the novel, we are told that the reason Lilia is going off to Italy is because her in-laws are trying to break off her relationship with a certain Mr. Kingcroft. As a widow, Lilia is supposed to know better than to flirt with another man, so the Herritons are quick to nip her affair in the bud. But we're never given any details about how intimate Lilia actually was with Mr. Kingcroft.
Later in the novel, Lilia gives birth to a son, so we're going to take a wild guess here and say that she has sex with her husband Gino, but this all happens behind the scenes. Along the same lines, Philip begins to develop an attraction to Caroline Abbott, so he imagines that there's some sexual tension building up between them. But turns out that Caroline is in fact attracted to Gino (sorry, Philip!), so what we have here is a classic love triangle minus any explicit sexual descriptions.