Josephine Langton is an incurable romantic. She runs the local Library and lives with her mother, Glenda, a retired junior school headmistress. Josephine has never married and loves nothing better than to lose herself in a romantic novel where she casts herself as the damsel in distress to the knight in shining armour or the dusky Arab prince or the seafaring Captain. Josephine is forty and desperate for real romance rather than that which she can obtain from her books. Glenda encourages Josephine to join her in helping her friends, Gordon and Althea Wilkes. The Wilkes are fabulously wealthy and live in a stately home with a dozen servants, stables and horses, a deer park and a working farm. Althea was injured when she had fallen from a horse and Gordon plans to take her to a clinic in Switzerland for specialist medical treatment. During their one-year absence, they convince Glenda and Josephine to work as house-sitters in their huge home, although in practice, Glenda and later Josephine, are contracted as housekeepers. They become servants in the house but there is the unspoken and heavily-implied promise that, upon Gordon's return, he will marry Josephine and make her the lady of the manor. Events in Switzerland have an impact upon what happens when Gordon returns and are influential upon Josephine's quest for romance and love that go beyond the fiction of her romantic novels.