This novel is based on the true story of Mary Robinson, a beautiful young woman from the village of Buttermere in the Lake District (daughter of the owner of the Fish Inn, now the Buttermere Court Hotel), who was infamously inveigled into marriage by a rogue by the name of John Hatfield, who impersonated a genuine aristocrat and MP, Alexander Augustus Hope. The story was a regional sensation of the time and was commented upon by the Lakeland poets Wordsworth and Coleridge. In fact, despite the novel's title, this story was much more about the motivations and thought processes of Hatfield, than about Mary herself, who despite coming across as honourable and strong-willed also lacks depth as a character and is rather portrayed as a symbol of female innocence manipulated by a deceitful man.

Of course this is as much a novel about the Lake District as a region as it is about any of the characters. For example, this description of Buttermere: "Mr Fenton looked up the length of the lake to the fortress of fells which lent Buttermere its utterly secured character: only one or two distant forms indicated a human presence and they shaded into the evening haze. There was a deepening purple of the crags, the water mirrored that and yet parts of the surface still glittered from the peach reflections which came off some of the clouds. It was peace itself. ......... There was something about the scale, the balance of lake, fell and sky, the colours, the secluded space, the deep peace which not only appealed to what was best in him but seemed, in some way he could not explain but he knew that he could feel, to fulfil him, make him whole, in some profound way to represent him."

Similarly: ".....vale of Grasmere, a prospect described by great poets as an unsuspected paradise, depicted by painters as a jewel set in nature, sought out by the fashionable, protected by the sensible, evoker of sublime epithets, a small, ovaloid dream lake ringed by mountains proportioned in a measure which touched the intelligence as much as the eye; if any one place deserves the description, then Grasmere Vale could claim to be in the very eye of the Romantic storm, in its beauty, its seclusion, its inhabitants and its capacity to draw in and draw out some of the greatest artists of the era"; as Hatfield describes it more prosaically to himself, "like a soup bowl with a little puddle left over in the bottom"! ( )

Excellent writing and good pace. Reads as though it's a fictionalised telling of a true story (early 19th century) - is it? ( )

i listened to this. i don't know if it was the content or the reader but i couldn't focus. also it was abridged. ( )