A bold and captivating novel about love, passion, and ambition that imagines the muse of William Shakespeare and the tumultuous year they spend together.
The year is 1590, and Queen Elizabeth's Spanish Armada victory has done nothing to quell her brutal persecution of the English Catholics. Katharine de L'Isle is living at Lufanwal Hall, the manor of her uncle, Sir Edward. Taught by her cherished uncle to read when a child, Katharine is now a thirty-one-year-old widow. She has resigned herself to a life of reading and keeping company with her cousins and their children. But all that changes when the family's priest, who has been performing Catholic services in secret, is found murdered. Faced with threats of imprisonment and death. Sir Edward is forced to flee the country, leaving Katharine adrift in a household rife with turmoil.
At this time of unrest, a new schoolmaster arrives from Stratford, a man named William Shakespeare. Coarse, quick-whited, and brazenly flirtatious, Shakespeare swiftly disrupts what fragile piece there is left at Lufanwal. Katharine is first appalled by the boldness of this new tutor, but when she learns he is a poet, and one of talent, things between them begn to shift, and soon Katharine finds herself drawn into Shakespeare's verse, and his life, in ways that will change her forever.
Inventive and absorbing, The Tutor is a masterful wor of historical fiction, casting Shakespeare in a light we've never seen.
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“Debut novelist Chapin has crafted a fascinating and masterly background
to Shakespeare’s first published work, the narrative poem Venus and
Adonis…Fans of historical fiction writers such as Philippa
Gregory, Rosalind Miles, and Anne Easter Smith won’t want to miss this
one.”
—
Library Journal