A novel based on the lives of Héloïse and Abélard.
About Héloïse and Abélard (from Wikipedia):
Héloïse (1090/1100 – 16 May 1164) was a French nun, writer, scholar, and abbess, best known for her love affair and correspondence with Peter Abélard.
Héloïse is accorded an important place in French literary history and in the development of feminist representation. While few of her letters survive, those that do have been considered a foundational “monument” of French literature from the late thirteenth century onwards. Her correspondence, more erudite than it is erotic, is the Latin basis for the bildungsroman and a model of the classical epistolary genre, which influenced writers as diverse as Madame de Lafayette, Laclos, Rousseau and Dominique Aury.
About the author (from Wikipedia):
George Augustus Moore (24 February 1852 – 21 January 1933) was an Irish novelist, short-story writer, poet, art critic, memoirist and dramatist. Moore came from a Roman Catholic landed family who lived at Moore Hall in Carra, County Mayo. He originally wanted to be a painter, and studied art in Paris during the 1870s. There, he befriended many of the leading French artists and writers of the day.
As a naturalistic writer, he was amongst the first English-language authors to absorb the lessons of the French realists, and was particularly influenced by the works of Émile Zola. His writings influenced James Joyce, according to the literary critic and biographer Richard Ellmann, and, although Moore’s work is sometimes seen as outside the mainstream of both Irish and British literature, he is as often regarded as the first great modern Irish novelist.
