A series of provocative letters, included with Henry James' foreword to the collection on its publication in 1916, which are as much a portrait of the gifted young poet, with all his own prejudices, as they are of two young, optimistic countries at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Three years after Lord Byron dismissed, Dr John Polidori has fallen on hard times. And then a woman mistakes the doctor for the poet. As the pair fall in love, Polidori knows that he can only emerge from Byron's shadow if he confesses his true identity to the girl; but was it only Byron's shadow that led her to love him in the first place?
Captures a city in microcosm through a series of character portraits, and forms a picture of people whose lives are inextricably linked by circumstance and community - but above all by a need to be loved. This novel features wry humour and the subtle shades of Manhattan moods.
Nineteen-year old Annabella Milbanke, visiting London for the swirl of parties and engagements of the season, is introduced to Byron at a waltz. He has just published Childe Harold , and is surrounded by a crowd of admirers, one of whom is his half-sister Augusta Leigh. Annabella and Byron fall in love.
Douglas Pitt is a man obsessed. His all-consuming quest to prove the genius of Samuel Highgate Syme has stalled. Pitt's postulation is simple - Syme, through some fault, has not been credited with the recognition he deserves for developing the theory of continental drift.
Amid a swirl of parties and engagements, eligible bachelors and dazzling debutantes comes nineteen-year-old Lady Annabella Milbanke, already well versed in London social life in the early nineteenth century. This novel dramatises the rise and fall of a literary romance and the relationship in its shadow.
In Fall we see the tentative beginnings of an unlikely romance - between a schoolteacher and a wealthy, drifting former graduate. In Winter we hear the story of her colleague, whose brief fling produced, as he now learns, seventeen years too late, a daughter. Then the daughter's best friend, her love affair with a teacher and the story of her dying father take us through Spring and Summer. This ..
Having been dismissed from Lord Byron's service, Dr John Polidori had fallen on hard times. Three years earlier he had accompanied the poet on a tour of the continent, Poladori had held literary ambitions and wanted to test his talents against the greatest writer of his age. And now a young woman mistakes the doctor for the poet.