Most of the story takes place in a room in a house called 'The Snuggery', which the narrator, "Jack", converts into an erotic torture chamber equipped with beds to which women can be strapped and held helpless.
[1] The first of many victims lured into 'The Snuggery' is a girl called Alice, a member of Jack's social set who had earlier jilted him and on whom he takes revenge by subjecting her to a series of sexual acts without her consent.
[6] By the final episode, when the wealthy Lady Betty and her daughter Molly have been lured into the rape room, his earlier victims-turned-accomplices undress and restrain the women.
Thereupon, mother and daughter are not only subjected to repeated rape, but also forced into a long series of incestuous acts with each other, carried out to inflict maximum humiliation and degradation upon them, and accompanied by endless gloating and taunting from Jack and his three female accomplices.
[5][9] In addition to the "quite perverse" scenes of rape, bondage, mother-daughter incest, whipping and "odd things done with feathers" to force women into orgasm, the book has a major element of lesbianism.
For example, a Hebrew translation current in Israel in the 1970s had an added "flashback" not found in the English original, according to which Molly had already undergone repeated anal rape by the doctor in her boarding school, before falling into Jack's hands.
[14] The Way of a Man with a Maid was adapted as a softcore exploitation film entitled What the Swedish Butler Saw (1975), starring Sue Longhurst as Alice and Ole Soltoft as Jack.