Book description
Marie Powell is sixteen when her father marries her to the poet John
Milton in payment of a debt. They move to a pretty garden-house in
London, but she struggles to adjust to her new life. Her husband is
high-minded and unyielding, and only makes Marie long for the man she
really loves. As Civil War sweeps across England and the King is
killed, a battle starts to rage between husband and wife - one that
only the powerful can win.
Told through the fictional journals of Milton's wife, Robert
Graves's sympathetic and sensitive reconstruction of her tragic life
is also a convincing, linguistically rich portrait of
seventeenth-century England as it is ravaged by war.
Robert Graves was a poet, professor, and the author of
Goodbye to
All That
(1929), a landmark anti-heroic memoir of life in the trenches during
World War I. He is even better known for his historical novels about the
Roman emperor Claudius:
I, Claudius
(1934) and
Claudius the God
(1935). Despite those successes, Graves was primarily a poet: he
published dozens of volumes of his verse during his life, and was
professor of poetry at Oxford from 1961-66. Graves lived most of his
adult life on the island of Majorca, at first with fellow poet Laura
Riding, and later with his second wife Beryl Hodge.
