Flora Monk, a promising but struggling novelist in her thirties, plans to make her name known with a biography of Claudia Charles, a distant cousin of her mother’s, described in her recent Times obituary as ‘an early feminist, and one of the world’s finest writers of twentieth –century prose’. But this project is not one to please Flora’s aunts, nor her elderly widowed mother Primrose, who vehemently opposes it, for reasons Flora can’t fathom.