This is the compelling tale of the narrator's search for Lucy R., the young Scottish governess briefly described in Freud's Five Studies in Hysteria, in Vienna. Cecily Mackworth went to Vienna to uncover the identity of Lucy, but found that no records survived the great fire of 1845. Mackworth trudges through bourgeois Vienna, imagining Lucy and her life as well as exploring her own memories of the ruined city she had visited as journalist forty years earlier.
