Drawing on years of investigation and Anne Lister's five-million-word secret journal, Emma Donoghue presents a novel based on the long-buried love story of Eliza Raine, an orphan heiress banished from India to England at age six, and Anne Lister, a brilliant, troublesome tomboy, who meet at the Manor School for young ladies in York in 1805 when they are both fourteen. As their friendship quickly blossoms into an intensely intimate first love, Eliza and Raine are forced to grapple with their romance in secret as two young women of high expectations. And when their love affair is cut unexpectedly short, one of them never recovers.