While in Lyme Regis to visit his fiancee, Ernestina Freeman, Charles Smithson, a 32-year-old paleontologist, becomes fascinated by the mysterious Sarah Woodruff. A fallen woman said to have been jilted by a French officer, Sarah is a pariah to the well-bred society that Charles and Ernestina are a part of. While searching for fossils in a wooded coastal area, Charles encounters Sarah alone, and his curiosity and pity for her soon evolve into other...

Nicholas Urfe accepts a teaching post on a remote Greek island, in order to escape an unsatisfactory love affair. He meets the Maurice Conchis, who introduces him to Lily, his ideal of the perfect woman. But is she flesh or fantasy? As the past bleeds into the present, he finds it increasingly difficult to distinguish reality from imagination. Under the spell of this magic isle and its presiding spirit, he struggles to understand the rules of the...

A parallel narrative of a Victorian-era gentleman and the social outcast he risks everything to love, and of the contemporary actors cast in those roles and immersed in their own forbidden affair.