Governess is a novel about a former Olympic athlete named Tess who some think is too sexy for politics. She grows up too quickly as a teenager and one of the few women living at the training facility in Lake Placid, subject to school boy harassment. She becomes best known for a spectacular crash on the luge, nearly killing her. Unable to suppress her curiosity she goes to Providence to meet her father, who she has never known. However, she arrives just when her corrupt and compromised father takes his own life. Her brother has been groomed to succeed him. As a lark, a newspaper includes her name in its poll of potential candidates. She gets as much support as he does, so despite having been in the state a few weeks she decides to run. She is elected governor of Rhode Island at a shockingly young age.

A nearly all-male state legislature mocks her, considering it an insult to their manhood that a girl in her 20s would rule over them. They call her governess rather than a governor to insult her, but the sobriquet sticks and she comes to like it. After completing her second term she is left out of consideration for national office because of her age and tiny size of her state. She moves to NYC. Through aggressive online dating and the deft illusion of sexual availability she builds a network of wealthy men who become her financial supporters. She is elected lieutenant governor then governor of New York. She fights off slut-shaming and the scandal of her sexuality and becomes a national celebrity by being a commanding presence on the serious TV talk shows.

Midway through the story it is revealed that the narrator is her illegitimate son, who was raised by her sister as her own. Tess rushes to tell him of his true origins before the story breaks. The campaign sends her son to suppress the unwelcome efforts of men she has dated, who are organizing themselves to hold a press conference to defend her honor. Her son assumes that one must be his father but no one comes forth to claim the prize. Meanwhile, the women Tess has been involved with are in hiding, hoping that Election Day will free them from scandal that would engulf them, if they revealed the truth.

Her party nominates her and she struggles through a campaign of humiliation, allegedly outing her as a closeted lesbian and, perversely, also a slut who has slept with too many men to be respectable. Her flirtatious public appearances are excoriated by her opponents as “resistance porn.” She is a luminous, quasi-irresistible image on television and is headed for victory. Her campaign comes to an end the weekend before Election Day when she is assassinated while on stage in the midwest. The perpetrators are presumed to be political assassins but years later a deathbed confession reveals that they are mobsters. They are not enraged by Tess’s sexuality or her politics but because Tess’s father, before he died, stashed his ill-gotten gains in a Swiss bank account. Thirty years later it had doubled and doubled again until it was a significant sum. When they became aware of this stash the mobsters wanted her to get it back for them. They intended to meet and threaten her in person and they thought she was evading them. It was not, as they thought, active resistance on her part but the sheer impossibility of getting the candidate’s attention amidst the noise and chaos of a presidential campaign.

Her funeral train winds eastward from the midwest and is showered with love and attention. Her body is delivered to Albany where she is to be buried. Just about all of the feminist icons of the age gather to honor her. She wins the election posthumously. In her afterlife she becomes Elvis or Marilyn or JFK — more influential as legends than they were when alive. Her son decides he must get rid of the money quickly before it causes more trouble. He gives it to women running for the U.S. Senate, equalizing their financial standing with their male rivals for the first time. This is Tess’s legacy. It transforms the dynamic of the Senatorial elections, bringing to office twice as many women as had ever served in the Senate before. In her honor they call themselves the Tess Caucus.