Relates the story of nineteenth-century English poet Caroline Norton, who was denied access to her children by her husband after a sensational trial for adultery, and fought tirelessly for the rights of married women and mothers, resulting in the passage of the Infant Custody Act of 1839.

Their names are synonymous with some of English literature's most timeless and celebrated novels. The real life story of the famous Bronte sisters, however, is steeped in even greater controversy and heartbreak than the lives of their tragic characters.

We know the facts of Mary Shelley's life in some detail--the death of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, within days of her birth; the upbringing in the house of her father, William Godwin, in a house full of radical thinkers, poets, philosophers, and writers; her elopement, at the age of seventeen, with Percy Shelley; the years of peripatetic travel across Europe that followed. But there has been no literary biography written this century, and previous...

How does a story begin? Sometimes it begins with a dream, and a dreamer. Mary is one such dreamer, a little girl who learns to read by tracing the letters on the tombstone of her famous feminist mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, and whose only escape from her strict father and overbearing stepmother is through the stories she reads and imagines. Unhappy at home, she seeks independence, and at the age of sixteen runs away with poet Percy Bysshe Shelley,...

"In 1820, the Brontë family traveled to their new home on the edge of Haworth Moor. There, the Brontë sisters and their brother were given the freedom to explore and expand their imaginative minds, providing the inspiration needed to create literary masterpieces that would be enjoyed for generations to come. ... After the death of their mother at a young age followed by the loss of their two oldest sisters to tuberculosis, Charlotte, Emily, and...

"This picture book biography shines a light on the little-known poet and author of the beloved lullaby, and tells the story behind the classic and universally recognized rhyme"--