About the Swedish author Agnes Von Krusenstjerna during the period of her marriage to David Sprengel. In the hallucinatory opening sequence she is brought in a straitjacket by her husband and two psychiatric nurses through the Venice Carnival nocturnal antics to a mental hospital in the city. With her is a manuscript of her autobiography, which she calls "her child". The book is Agnes showdown with her family, and in flashbacks presented, Agnes progress from the author of innocent girls' books to serious and self-consuming novelist.

A family in their summer house in the Stockholm archipelago. The two daughters fantasize they are adults, representing different colors - red, yellow, blue, green, violet, black and indigo.

As three pregnant women wait to have their babies in a hospital in Stockholm at the outbreak of the Great War, they relive their childhood and youthful experiences.