Emma Donoghue

Based on the true story of two girls who fall secretly, deeply, and dangerously in love at boarding school in 19th century York, Learned by Heart is a heartbreakingly gorgeous novel from the bestselling author of Room and The Wonder. Drawing on years of investigation and Anne Lister’s five-million-word secret journal, Learned by Heart is 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. Emotionally intense, psychologically compelling, and deeply researched, Learned by Heart is an extraordinary work of fiction by one of the world’s greatest storytellers. Full of passion and heartbreak, the tangled lives of Anne Lister and Eliza Raine form a love story for the ages.

Learned by Heart

Lindsay

But it's easier to ignore the fact that there's a ladder if you're perched at the top.

Have time and thinking tamed the eleven-year-old's grief, or has she only learned that there's no point in expressing it to an indifferent world?

Are we girls sent to school just to keep us out of the way until our services are required, Raine? Don't our lives belong to us at all?

And I ask myself why the present tense is the only one that matters. Can't the past be a sort of present too, if I plunge into memory and swim like a fish? Since every moment is fleeting, gone as soon as noted, so perhaps past, present, and future are all thin slices of reality, all flickering, all equally in (some sense) true.

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