An unlikely family is born. In nineteenth-century Edinburgh, two schoolteachers open a boarding school, dreaming of laying the foundations for an independent life together. Soon after, an aristocrat decides to enrol her “illegitimate” fifteen-year-old granddaughter, and the newly built world of Miss Pirie and Miss Woods begins to crack — especially when the grandmother suggests that Jane should spend the summer there as well. The school year resumes, and everything spills over.