When Dr Beth Ayres becomes the archival custodian of Laura Jane Day, her University's first female Professor, she is struck by the troubling absence of Laura on public record, but a mysterious reference to letters from Ravensbruck sparks a quest to uncover the truth. A working classwoman who fought against the odds to study at Oxford, Laura blazed a trail as a classicist, before a mysterious reversal finds her teaching Humanities at a polytechnic in a small Welsh town in the 1970s. Beth's search leads her to a cache of letters written in German by Helena -a communist and inmate of Ravensbruck concentration camp for women-to her lover Ruth in England. As Beth pieces together the women's suppressed histories, her research becomes an act of activism, culminating in her decision to publish the letters and Laura's last work in an act of solidarity and defiance.
