Summary

In the year of 1873, at a small house in Tunbridge, a woman named Eliza Touchet works as a caretaker to an aging writer named William Ainsworth. Although William once enjoyed a great deal of fame because of his success as a writer, he has long been surpassed by his contemporaries like Charles Dickens and has faded away into obscurity with his old age. Eliza, who is also William’s cousin by marriage, takes a keen interest in his affairs, and bears a great deal of resentment toward William’s new wife, Sarah Wells, who comes from a lower-class background and is, in Eliza’s estimation, too illiterate to be worthy of William’s attention. To make matters worse, their marriage takes place in a way that appears to Eliza as though it erases the memory of the woman who has left William a...