"A nuanced, comprehensive portrait of Britain's most famous female poet, a woman who invented herself and defied her times. "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways." With these words, Elizabeth Barrett Browning has come down to us as a romantic heroine, a recluse controlled by a domineering father and often overshadowed by her husband, Robert Browning. But behind the melodrama lies a thoroughly modern figure whose extraordinary life is a study...

"A tender and engrossing historical novel about the unlikely love affair between two great nineteenth-century poets, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett. 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"--