The following version of this book was used to create the guide: Gray, Alasdair. Poor Things. Mariner Books, 2023.

Alasdair Gray's novel Poor Things is written from multiple first person points of view and spans roughly a century in time. In the 1990s, a Glasgow historian discovers Achibald McCandless's memoir and gives it to the fictional Alasdair Gray for publication. Gray edits and compiles Archie's narrative and his wife Victoria McCandless's written response to it into a single text, which he renames Poor Things. Therefore, the novel neither follows a linear plot line nor novelistic convention. For the sake of clarity, the following summary relies upon the present tense and a more streamlined mode of explanation.

Victoria Hattersley lives with her parents in Manchester, England. After her mother's death, she attends a convent school and learns how to become a member of polite society. Shortly thereafter, she meets and marries Sir Aubrey Blessington. The marriage affords her an escape from her father, but soon proves as entrapping as her former home life. Blessington refuses to sleep with Victoria and has her examined by a Dr. Pickett for her sexual urges. The doctor deems her an erotomaniac, and plans to remove her clitoris after she gives birth. When Victoria is nine months pregnant, she flees her home in London for Glasgow, Scotland. She then throws herself into the River Clyde.

A Glasgow scientist and doctor named Godwin Baxter receives Victoria's body from the Humane Society. He delivers the baby, extracts her brain, and transplants it into Victoria's skull. After reviving her, he renames her Bella Baxter.

Baxter runs into Archie McCandless, an acquaintance from medical school, and invites him to his Park Circus home to meet Bella. Archie is immediately taken by her, although convinced that she has suffered brain damage. During another visit with her not long later, Archie proposes marriage.

Just six days after Bella accepts Archie's proposal, she meets and decides to run away with Baxter's lawyer, Duncan Wedderburn. She knows he has no moral character, but wants to see the world with him anyway. The two flee Park Circus and take a world tour together.

Archie moves in with Baxter following Bella's departure. Throughout Bella's trip, the men read her and Wedderburn's letters and make conjectures about Bella's well-being.

Meanwhile, Bella's time abroad teaches her new things about herself and the world around her. She once saw the world through a childlike lens. However, her adventures in Gibraltar, Odessa, Alexandria, and Paris expose her to hardship, pain, and suffering. After freeing herself from Wedderburn, she eventually returns to Glasgow.

Bella and Archie go to the church to get married. However, Blessington and his cohort of supporters interrupt the service and contest the marriage. Blessington insists that Bella is his wife Victoria and demands that she return to London with him. Back at Park Circus, Blessington, his lawyer, and Bella's supposed father and former doctor relay the story of Victoria Blessington's past to Bella, Baxter, and Archie. Baxter knows their accounts are true, but does not reveal the truth of his role in Bella's life. Bella has no memory of the men who claim to be her intimates, and thus decides to stay with Baxter and Archie. She goes on to marry Archie, earn her medical degree, start a family, and become and accomplished doctor.

After Archie's death, Bella, or Victoria, discovers that Archie has written the story of their life together. She is horrified by the fiction he has created and seeks to refute it in a letter to her future descendants. Almost a century later, Glasgow historians find these documents, manipulate them, and publish them.