Doctor Cupid

A young woman engaged to one man discovers what she feels for another, and Broughton lets her say so — which is why Oxford drawing rooms kept her novels out of sight while everyone read them. She was the niece of Sheridan Le Fanu, wrote frank heroines for fifty years, and lived to be called old-fashioned by the generation she had scandalised. Fifty-two plates, among them Tissot and John Frederick Lewis, trace the courtship rituals, portraits and self-scrutiny that surround a mistaken engagement.