Passion

A Dazzling Novel Of The Turbulent Lives Of The Romantic Poets And The Women Who Loved Them.

In the turbulent years of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, three poets - Byron, Shelley, Keats - come to prominence: famous and infamous, for their vivid personalities, their glamorous, shocking and sometimes tragic lives. In this electrifying novel, those lives are explored through the eyes of the women who knew and loved them - intensely, scandalously.

Four women . . . from widely different backgrounds, they are brought together by a sensational fate. Mary Shelley: the gifted daughter of gifted parents, for whom passion leads to exile, loss, and a unique fame. Lady Caroline Lamb: born to fabulous wealth and aristocratic position, who risks everything for the ultimate love affair, and comes into shattering conflict with society's hypocrisy. Fanny Brawne: her quiet, middle-class girlhood is transformed - and immortalised - by a disturbing encounter with genius. Augusta Leigh: the unassuming poor relation who only seeks to get by, and yet finds herself flouting the greatest of all taboos.

With the originality, richness and daring of the poets themselves, 'Passion' moves from the shadow of the guillotine to the salons of the Whig nobles, from the penury and vitality of Grub Street to the haunts of the Regency dandies, from the carrion field of Waterloo to the corrupt beauty of Venice, and presents the Romantic generation in a new, contemporary and unforgettable light.