Royal Academy, London 1919: Lily has put her student days in St. Ives,
Cornwall, behind her--a time when her substitute mother, Mrs. Ramsay,
seemingly disliked Lily's portrait of her and Louis Grier, her tutor,
never seduced her as she hoped he would. In the years since, she's been
a suffragette and a nurse in WWI, and now she's a successful artist with
a painting displayed at the Royal Academy. Then Louis appears at the
exhibition with the news that Mrs. Ramsay has died under suspicious
circumstances. Talking to Louis, Lily realizes two things: 1) she must
find out more about her beloved Mrs. Ramsay's death (and her
sometimes-violent husband, Mr. Ramsay), and 2) She still loves Louis.
Set between 1900 and 1919 in picturesque Cornwall and war-blasted
London, Talland House takes Lily Briscoe from the pages of Virginia
Woolf's To the Lighthouse and tells her story outside the confines of
Woolf's novel--as a student in 1900, as a young woman becoming a
professional artist, her loves and friendships, mourning her dead
mother, and solving the mystery of her friend Mrs. Ramsay's sudden
death. Talland House is both a story for our present time, exploring the
tensions women experience between their public careers and private
loves, and a story of a specific moment in our past--a time when women
first began to be truly independent.
