Personal Recollections

Charlotte Elizabeth has no intention of leaving her life to strangers: she has watched biographers turn private letters into “filthy lucre” and fears her own story may become a strange romance, half fact and half invention.

Writing in early nineteenth-century Britain, she sets out to record her own history before others can distort it: not the secrets of private homes, but the spiritual trials and public controversies that shaped her convictions. Her recollections begin in Norwich, where a child’s quiet hours among cathedral gardens and an old prison gateway kindle both dreamy imaginings and a lifelong devotion to Protestantism. Charlotte must tell her story truthfully without betraying the confidence she has so fiercely guarded—and without turning herself into the heroine of a tale others might invent. What will she choose to reveal, and what will those early sights come to mean?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

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