Mary Swann, a sort of Canadian Emily Dickinson, submitted a paperbag full of poems to newspaper editor Frederic Cruzzi just hours before her husband hacked her to pieces. Who is Mary Swann? And how could someone in all ways completely isolated have produced these works of genius? The pedant misogynist and Mary Swann's biographer, Morton Jimroy is determined to prove that her work shows a debt to T S Eliot. But the local librarian, timid Rose Hindmarch, whose life up until now has held no excitement, know that Mary Swann only read trash and that the library didn't even have T S Eliot's work on the shelves. To stay in the limelight, however, she'll say whatever is required. Frederic Cruzzi tries to understand the motive. And he should know. Sarah Maloney, who made a name for herself as a young feminist scholar, is intent of discovering a clue to Mary Swann in the poet's domestic notebooks. But there is nothing there except the entirely mundane. Anyway, Sarah is coming to recognise a conflicting and powerful pull of domesticity in herself. Four flawed individuals, but all with some self knowledge, who find in Mary Swann the key to the fulfilment of their needs, but understand Mary Swann herself not at all. Perhaps only we the reader understand what there is to know, what it is possible to know.