Learned by Heart Summary
Emma Donoghue

Learned by Heart Overview

Emma Donoghue’s Learned by Heart (2023) is a romantic historical novel. It imagines the life of notorious diarist Anne Lister when she was at school in York, from 1805 to 1806. However, it is Lister’s first lover – the lesser-known Eliza Raine – who Donoghue takes up as her protagonist. The form is partly epistolary, with a series of fictional letters from Raine to Lister (written a decade after the main events) intercutting the core chapters. The novel thus switches between first- and third-person points of view, while exploring themes of memory, mental illness, gender, sexuality, social status and racial prejudice, in early nineteenth-century Britain.