In 1814, young Mary Godwin impulsively runs away from England to post revolutionary France with her lover, Percy Shelley and her stepsister, Claire Clairmont, where they form a ménage à trois, as a way of striking back at the marriage laws of England, which they view as the enslavement of women. Instead of an enlightened, free country, they find a decimated land, destroyed by not only the Revolution but by 4 Napoleonic Wars. Mary befriends a horribly scarred, reclusive former soldier, who tells her a macbre story about the day his beloved was sent to the guillotine. On their return to England the threesome discover that their absence has created a void in their families that erupts into tragedy after tragedy, until Mary, on the brink of despair, discovers her true voice as a writer.