Told over 40 years, from the death of Queen Victoria to the Second World War, the story centres on the close and often fraught relationship between sisters Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, and Vanessa’s sexually complicated alliance with gay artist Duncan Grant. Surrounded by the finest progressive minds of the day – including the renowned writer Lytton Strachey, art critic Clive Bell, and pioneering economist Maynard Keynes – they are determined to shake off the shackles of Victorian England.