In the 1840s acclaimed self-taught palaeontologist Mary Anning (Kate Winslet) works alone in the brutal Southern English coastline of Lyme Regis. With the days of her famed discoveries behind her, she now sells common fossils to wealthy tourists in order to support herself and her ailing mother.

When tourist Roderick Murchison (James McArdle) arrives in Lyme, he hires Mary to care for his young wife Charlotte (Saoirse Ronan) who is recovering from a personal tragedy. Mary’s life is a daily struggle on the poverty line and can’t afford to turn him down, but proud and relentlessly passionate about her work, she clashes with her unwanted guest.

They are two women from utterly different worlds, yet despite the chasm between them, Mary and Charlotte discover they can offer each other what they’ve both been searching for: the realization that they are not alone. It is the beginning of a passionate and all-consuming love affair that will defy all social bounds and alter the course of both lives irrevocably.