Melissa Ashley depicts the struggles of a woman attempting to reconcile the demands of her profession with her domestic responsibilities. Via Eliza’s first-person narration, the reader is privy to her grief, frustrations, and desires as she suffers through serial pregnancies, separation from her children, and the unreasonable demands of a loving but ambitious husband who encourages the development of her art but frowns upon her identification as an artist, which would ‘violate’ the ‘code of female conduct’.

Ashley has written an absorbing account of a period in which the passion for natural history, and the obsession among amateur and professional naturalists alike to be the first to collect and classify new specimens, drawn from the far reaches of the British Empire and beyond, was rife. In the course of the Goulds’ collaboration, they encountered other scientists and artists – among them, Charles Darwin (and his finches), Edward Lear, Sir John and Lady Jane Franklin – all of whom feature in the narrative. The extent of Ashley’s research is clear; although it can at times sit heavily upon the page, it is the foundation of the novel’s vivid sense of time and place, as well as its detailed description of the intricate practices of taxidermy and ornithological illustration.