` Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.` Ruth Weiss, an academic, is beautiful, intelligent & lonely. Studying the heroines of Balzac in order to discover where her own childhood & adult life has gone awry, she seeks not salvation but enlightenment. Yet in revisiting her London upbringing, her friendships & doomed Parisian love affairs, she wonders if perhaps there might not be a chance for a new start in life.. .