1915. Europe is in the grip of war but the artists and writers of the London Bloomsbury group carry on their merry way. On a fine winter's afternoon, the writer Lytton Strachey, a hardened bachelor and apparently a committed "gay", goes to visit Virginia Woolf's sister, Vanessa Bell, and her husband Clive on the south coast of England. As the setting sun casts its dying rays over the Bell's garden, Lytton is tranfixed by an androgynous figure. He admires the golden, bobbed hair and pale skin of this delightful vision... who turns out to be a young female artist, Dora Carrington, renowned for her wild, anti-conformist temperament. This chance encounter is the start of a deep affection that will mark their lives for the next seventeen years...