Spirits touching

Novel brings to vivid life the relationship of a historical celebrity and her young lover.

- ANNE ELSE

This novel focuses on two real people: Eliza Raine and her friend Anne Lister, pupils at an English boarding school in the early 1800s. As the background notes at the end helpfully explain, Eliza was born in Madras in 1791 to an East India company surgeon from Yorkshire and the unknown Indian woman he lived with. In 1797, aged six, she and her older sister Jane were shipped to Yorkshire by their father. When he died, in 1800, he left his daughters the substantial sum of £4000 each, providing an income and passing to them when they married or turned 21. Their powerless mother had an allowance until she died two years later.

In 1803, their guardian sent them to Miss Hargrave's Manor School in York to prepare them for wifedom. Eliza was 14 when Lister, born the same year, arrived in 1805 to share her attic bedroom.