Daughter of an actress who toured France with an all female company playing Shakespeare's history play, Lettice Douffet has inherited her mother's theatricality and eccentricity. Employed as a guide round a shabby stately home, she enlivens its history with the own overimaginative fantasies, until she is caught in the act and promptly sacked.
Back in her basement flat in London, she is visited by the stiff and formal Preservation Trust official who fired her. An unlikely friendship develops as the two women discover that they both hate modern architecture, and stern, sensible Lotte is drawn into Lettice's world of historical romance.