Summary
In the hushed sanctum of a sun-bleached bindery, Jeanne—ink under her fingernails, rebellion in her marrow—receives a cracked-leather diary whose acid-brown pages hiss with invented sins: bigamist Thomas Dodd paints himself a libertine, his kin a cabal of poisoners and blackmailers. Instead of recoiling, Jeanne stitches the scandal into her own skin, forges a birthright, and glides into the Dodds’ candle-scented mansion as the prodigal daughter no one invited. The joke is cosmic: the ogre of the diary is a tremulous pensioner who merely dreamt his own villainy; the lone viper, Uncle Jerry, was once the solitary soul Thomas sentimentalised. While Jeanne tries to stage-manage other people’s hearts—pushing Kent, the wry war-returned nephew, toward wronged Hazel—her own pulse betrays her, drumming for Kent’s dry wit and paint-stained cuffs. Enter Sarah Ross, the diary’s supposed ruined heroine, now a straight-backed botanist who swears she never bore a child; her single sentence topples Jeanne’s scaffolding of lies. By the time Jerry’s forged deed meets Jeanne’s flick-knife guile, truth ricochets like light in a broken mirror: diaries burn, masks drop, and two proposals—one from Kent on a moon-soaked terrace, one from Thomas to Sarah amid the smell of freshly milled paper—close the film on a breath that is half-laugh, half-sigh.
Synopsis
Audacious Jeanne works in a book bindery, is given a diary written by one Thomas Dodd to bind. The diary portrays Dodd as a scoundrel who fathered a girl by a woman he never married, and Dodd's family as a nest of vipers. Jeanne decides it is her duty to save this corrupt family and presents herself to Dodd as his illegitimate daughter. In fact, Dodd is a meek old man whose scandalous diary was pure fantasy, and the only hostile member of the family is Dodd's greedy brother Jerry, who was the only sympathetic character in Dodd's diary. Jeanne falls in love with Dodd's nephew Kent, though she dutifully urges him to marry Hazel Jenkins, a woman whom Jeanne believes Kent has wronged. Finally Sarah Ross, the alleged mother of Dodd's child, ends Jeanne's suspicions by denying that she had ever had a daughter. After foiling Jerry's plan to usurp the family fortune, Jeanne confesses her charade and accepts Kent's love. Dodd likewise admits that his diary is a fake and proposes to Sarah.
