‘I see that you have the wrong idea about poets. We are makers, you know. We do not sit about admiring words. We must seize hold of them and chisel at them until they do what we want. Or what the poem wants, perhaps – but that is another question. [....]'
Against the backdrop of the French revolution, a woman in England, whose mother firmly believed in and wrote of liberty, equality and fraternity, married to a possessive and jealous property magnate who killed his first wife unbeknownst to her. The lies he told her, the lies she told herself, the lies she told her family. He ultimately lost their money and was forced to flee seeing her free. Her mother, dead by then, was later forgotten despite all her writing. Of women's lives and how readily they are forgotten.