Learned By Heart
The deeply moving historical novel from the award-winning author of Room
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- €6.99
Publisher Description
The heartbreaking story of the love of two women – Anne Lister, the real-life inspiration behind Gentleman Jack, and her first love, Eliza Raine – from the bestselling author of Room and The Wonder.
'A rich and spellbinding 19th-century story of forbidden love' – The Independent
'An exquisite coming-of-age love story' - The Times, Historical Fiction Book of the Month
In 1805, at a boarding school in York, two fourteen-year-old girls first meet.
Eliza Raine, the orphan daughter of an Indian mother, keeps herself apart from the other girls, tired of being picked out for being different. Anne Lister, a gifted troublemaker, is determined to conquer the world, refusing to bow to society’s expectations of what a woman can do.
As they fall in love, the connection they forge will remain with them for the rest of their lives.
Full of passion and heartbreak, evocative and wholly unique, Learned by Heart is a beautiful and moving historical novel from acclaimed author Emma Donoghue.
Shortlisted for the Atwood Gibson Prize
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Tenderness and heat, tentativeness and urgency—Learned by Heart tells the story of the beginning of love. In it, Emma Donoghue fictionalises the real-life love affair between Anne Lister (aka Gentleman Jack, on whose later life the BBC series of that name is based) and her schoolmate Eliza Raine, the orphaned daughter of an Indian mother, treated differently from her peers because of her race. Their relationship starts at boarding school, and as the pair simmer and spark, and strain against the strictures of their time and place, the novel is rich with detail about what was expected of a certain class of 19th-century girl being prepared for marriage. Interspersed are letters from Raine to Lister 10 years later, when their lives are almost unrecognisable. As Donoghue says in her author’s note, though Lister is now well known, Raine’s own extraordinary life and her part in Lister’s story have been nowhere near so well illuminated. This novel, a welcome corrective, is also enthralling in its own right.
