Katharine Hilbery is beautiful and privileged, but uncertain of her future. She must choose between becoming engaged to the oddly prosaic poet William Rodney, and her dangerous attraction to the passionate Ralph Denham. As she struggles to decide, the lives of two other womenwomen’s rights activist Mary Datchet and Katharine’s mother, Margaret, struggling to weave together the documents, events and memories of her own father’s life into a biographyimpinge on hers with unexpected and intriguing consequences.