While everyone else in the early 1980s was reading Derrida, Madeleine Hanna was happily absorbed with Jane Austen and George Eliot. But after Madeleine enrolls in a semiotics course things will never be the same. Not after she falls in love with charismatic loner Leonard Morten, who introduces her to the ecstasies of immediate experience. And certainly not after Mitchell Grammaticus – resurfaces in her life, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is destined to be his mate.