This novel is GWENDOLENs passionate later-life letter to a handsome man who caught her eye at the gambling tables-the man she did not marry-and reveals what happened across the brutal and transformative years of her early twenties, after she married wealthy aristocrat Grandcourt, despite her discovery of an alarming secret about his past. GWENDOLEN is also the heroine of George Eliot's novel Daniel Deronda (and is writing to Deronda).