by Ann Schlee
First published 1980
Charlotte Morrison steps onto a Rhine paddle-steamer in the summer of 1851, traveling with her brother Charles, a reverend, and his family. The romantic river journey takes an unexpected turn when Charlotte suddenly recognizes a fellow passenger as the man she abandoned years earlier under her brother's pressure. Her imagination spirals as she becomes fixated on this figure from her past. The rigid social conventions of Victorian England clash with Charlotte's growing internal turmoil. Her suppressed desires and unrestrained fantasies intensify as the steamboat carries them down the Rhine. Each encounter with the mysterious passenger draws Charlotte deeper into emotional conflict. She must face both the man who represents her forsaken dreams and the woman she has become in his absence. The journey becomes a reckoning between Charlotte's passionate inner life and the suffocating propriety that governs her world.
Genres: romance, historical-fiction, adult-fiction, 19th-century
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: enemies-to-lovers, forbidden-love
Setting: Rhine, England
Period: 1851
Hardcover · Holt, Rinehart & Winston, (1980)