Those of you who enjoyed Liz Hand’s Mortal Love, or who just like overwrought passions, may be interested in Franny Moyles new book, Desperate Romantics: Private lives of the Pre-Raphaelites. If only celebrity magazines had been around in those days, they would have had a field day. A review in The Independent sets the scene:

There’s the mother of a stillborn child telling guests not to wake the baby in an empty cradle; lovers wrestling on a tow path as one tries to hurl herself into the canal; a 48-year-old man chasing a carriage that he believes contains the teenage object of his obsession.

Drug addiction, adultery, madness, paranoia, suicide and sexual torment are all here – the darker side of High Victorianism.

It occurs to me that this could add a very different atmosphere to steampunk.