Copyright Date:
2024
Edition Date:
2024
Release Date:
03/12/24
Pages:
310 pages
ISBN:
1-643-75320-7
ISBN 13:
978-1-643-75320-1
Dewey:
Fic
LCCN:
2023055236
Dimensions:
24 cm
Language:
English
Reviews:
Publishers Weekly
(Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)
McNeal (The Practice House) chronicles the romance between mid-19th-century poets Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett in her distinctive latest. Elizabeth, fearing a return of the debilitating and undiagnosed illness that has plagued her for over 22 years, has confined herself in her father’s London home. There, she receives a letter from Robert, telling her he loves her and her poetry. The pair correspond for five months before she gives him permission to visit her in London. Through Robert’s weekly visits, they continue to fall in love, but Elizabeth initially refuses his marriage proposal, worried her father will react poorly, given that Robert had called on her as a friend rather than a suitor. Undeterred, Robert persuades her to marry him in secret. They live in peace even after her father learns of their marriage and disinherits her. McNeal capably evokes her protagonists’ poetic sensibilities both with dialogue (“I will conform my life to any imaginable rule that puts us together,” Robert says to Elizabeth), and with her own lyrical descriptions (“On the visceral green of the greenest grass fell white blossoms that the wind tumbled and carried like snow”). This insightful novel is a must for devotees of the romantics. Agent: Doug Stewart, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Mar.)
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Publishers Weekly
(Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)
An engrossing novel about the unlikely love affair between two great 19th-century poets: Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning
On a bleak January day in 1845, a poet who had been confined to her room for four years by recurrent illness received a letter from a writer she secretly idolized but had never seen. “I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett,” Robert Browning wrote, “and I love you too.”
Elizabeth Barrett was ecstatic. She was famous for her poetry but too frail for the kind of travel that Browning used to fuel his unsuccessful, innovative poems, which were full of spellbinding villains. The two began a passionate correspondence, but Elizabeth kept delaying a visit. What would happen when he saw her in person? Could she trust his emphatic promises? And would she survive if she secretly turned over the rights to all the money she earned to a man who promised he could take her to the bright, healing sun of Italy?
McNeal brilliantly dramatizes the perils of falling in love in the Victorian world, where family duty was the most important value of all, married women could not own property, and the fight for freedom and equality was funded by sugar crushed and boiled in the West Indies. Lyrically written, as rich as a Brontë novel, The Swan's Nest will immerse readers in the radical hope of two people who believed love in practice could be as enduring and faithful as love in poetry.
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