Abstract
Marie Powell is sixteen when her father marries her to the poet John Milton in payment of a debt. They move to a pretty garden-house in London, but she struggles to adjust to her new life. Her husband is high-minded and unyielding, and only makes Marie long for the man she really loves. As Civil War sweeps across England and the King is killed, a battle starts to rage between husband and wife—one that only the powerful can win. Told through the fictional journals of Milton's wife, Robert Graves's sympathetic and sensitive reconstruction of her tragic life is also a convincing, linguistically rich portrait of seventeenth-century England as it is ravaged by war.