An innocent and beautiful girl, Linnea rents an apartment in Stockholm just before WWI. As she works for an old man who owns a photography studio she meets Anna, a photographer with whom she develops a complex friendship. Anna’s circus-performer boyfriend and European politics complicate Linnea’s routine.

About the Swedish author Agnes Von Krusenstjerna during the period of her marriage to David Sprengel. In the hallucinatory opening sequence she is brought in a straitjacket by her husband and two psychiatric nurses through the Venice Carnival nocturnal antics to a mental hospital in the city. With her is a manuscript of her autobiography, which she calls "her child". The book is Agnes showdown with her family, and in flashbacks presented, Agnes progress from the author of innocent girls' books to serious and self-consuming novelist.