Dear Miss Baird
by Elizabeth Nussbaum

Dear Miss Baird traces the fortunes of a 19th-century family over a period of 60 years. Based on private documents, it is a personal and intimate account which also sheds light on many of the most important issues of the age, including the status of women and changing attitudes to religion, love and death. In its pages we also meet some of the most celebrated and influential figures of Victorian times—Thomas Arnold of Rugby, the classicist Benjamin Jowett and the actor–manager Henry Irving—and discover the extraordinary talents of a young artist and writer named Gertrude Baird, who died before her gifts could come to fruition.

ISBN 0954 6342 0 9/9780954 6342 0 9; 250 pp + 8 pp illustrations; £9.99 softback