A Sultry Month

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June 1846. As London swelters in a heatwave - sunstroke strikes, meat rots, ice is coveted - a glamorous coterie of writers and artists spend their summer wining, dining and opinin g. With the ringletted 'face of an Egyptian cat goddess', Elizabeth Barrett is courted by her secret fiancé, the poet Robert Browning, who plots their elopement to Italy; Keats roams Hampstead Heath; Wordsworth visits the zoo; Dickens is intrigued by Tom Thumb; the Carlyles host parties for a visiting German novelist and suffer a marital crisis. But when the visionary painter Benjamin Robert Haydon commits suicide, they find their entwined lives spiralling around the tragedy. Show more