by Laura McNeal
First published 2024
Elizabeth Barrett has spent four years confined to her room by illness when a letter arrives on a cold January day in 1845. Robert Browning, whose innovative poetry she secretly admires, writes to declare his love for both her verses and herself. Elizabeth feels ecstatic but also terrified. She begins exchanging letters with Robert, yet keeps postponing his visits. What will he think when he sees her frail condition? Can she trust a man whose family she has never met? Her conservative father and brothers would be scandalized by any romance, especially with someone so unconventional. Robert writes poems from murderers' perspectives while she remains trapped in her sickroom, famous but isolated. When Robert proposes they escape to Italy together, believing the warm climate might restore her health, Elizabeth faces an impossible choice. She must decide between the security of her controlled but stifling life and the dangerous possibility of love with a fellow poet who promises freedom she has never known.
Genres: romance, literary-fiction, historical-fiction, adult-fiction, biographical-fiction, 19th-century
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: enemies-to-lovers, forbidden-romance
Setting: Italy
Period: 1845
320 pages · Hardcover · Algonquin Books