To escape from the restraints of a suffocating relationship, Anna moves into a flat with a friend, Prue. In the old attic room which she adopts as her study, Anna is presented with a ghostly series of women through the ages - women who, like Anna, have not conformed to the usual roles of wife and mother - a Victorian spinster, a nun, a nurse who worked with Florence Nightingale during the Crimean War and a young wife who dies childless. Through these and the visits of the less transient figures of Simon, her doggedly devoted boyfriend, Dan, her flatmate's self-seeking and manipulative brother and Harriet, Prue's mother, Anna contemplates her life and what she wants from it.