This book tells the story of a young Gentleman Jack (Ann Lister) based on her time at a school
In York where she has a relationship with Raine, an orphan born in India. Until I read the author’s note I didn’t appreciate just how much reality was in the book.

I feared that I would only be able to picture the BBC/HBO version of Lister as I read but that couldn’t have been further from my mind. The plot is well paced and impeccably written and I haven’t enjoyed a historical fiction book as much since the first time I read Sarah Waters’ Tipping the Velvet. I’d very much like to see this adapted for the screen.

Enchanting with an edge as always. Donoghue again shows what a power house of writer she is. Full of well researched characters, a strong plot and social examination. Great read tho I did find it slow in parts and it dragged on for me. That being said still a very book

Emma Donahue portrays the colourful Lister and Raine’s burgeoning relationship in this masterful charming yet quiet account. She skilfully explores the societal mores of the time and how little is expected of women and how cloistered they were in preparation for being married off- how soulless and dull for these characters brought to vivid life. Many thanks to Netgalley for an arc of this book.

Set in the 1800s, Eliza boards at a school for young ladies in York. She is of mixed-race descent - her father is British and her mother is Indian and she doesn't seem to fit in. Until. Anne Lister arrives, turning her organised rule following world upside down.
The girls navigate an ever changing world and they fall into unforbidden love. Eliza is completley infatuated with Lister and as her life progresses, she writes love letters to Lister (whils incapatitated in an asylum).
The book's characters are researched well and they are believable, however, I did find the book slow - it just wasn't for me.

I was so excited to get an opportunity to read Learned by Heart, Emma Donaghue’s new novel early after being so moved by The Pull of the Stars. I went into this book pretty blind, knowing little more than it was a historical fiction Sapphic love story, which is what she does best!. What I didn’t know is that it’s a true story and a retelling of the first love of famed diarist and one of the first modern lesbians Anne Lister (made famous in the tv show Gentleman Jack) and her childhood school friend Eliza Raine.

The two girls met in Manor House a boarding school in York in 1805, Eliza Raine was a biracial orphaned heiress of an English doctor William Raine who was employed in the East India Company. She and her elder sister were sent to England as young children to be turned into English ladies, Eliza experienced a huge amount of racism and led her to become introverted and docile and confirm to societal expectations of a lady. She then encounters Anne Lister a rebellious tomboy who defies all social expectations, even going as stating that she will never marry. The two of them start to have an intense, secret and ultimately obsessive love affair in the school with disastrous long term consequences for Eliza which are quickly apparent to the reader as the novel is in part epistolary with Eliza writing letters to Anne in the present day and interspersed with chapters exploring their past relationship in school.

It's a beautiful novel and so immersive and intense you can imagine yourself as a schoolgirl in the Manor House and then the fate that befalls poor Eliza is straight out of a gothic horror ☹ Donoghue, does an incredible job of documenting the limitations that young women had in this period – even despite being an heiress Eliza had so little agency – her fortune wouldn’t be hers until she was 21 or married despite their desire to runaway together.

I knew very little about Anne Lister before reading this book and was fascinated with her diary keeping and indeed the rules of society that she broke as she grew up. If you like Donoghue’s writing then I’d highly recommend this one as it is an Incredibly well-researched, heartbreakingly gorgeous novel, featuring some absolutely unforgettable characters, I think historical fiction fans will enjoy this one!

Wasn't sure about the book based on the synopsis, but really enjoyed the story arc.
Incredibly evocative style of writing ; can clearly see in my minds eye the slope and the schoolrooms.

Thoroughly engrossing and at the same time draining, this has become a trademark of Donoghue, with the last books I read (the Pull of the Stars and Haven), where the subject matter is so dark, almost tragic it is difficult to read, but the story is so compelling it is difficult not to be totally hooked from the early chapters. I had watched the Gentleman Jack tv series, so I was absorbed by the novel straight away, and liked that. I do wonder if I would’ve been as engaged if I didn’t have this prior knowledge. I loved how alike the character of Anne Lister was portrayed in tv series and this book. I loved the sentence at the end “the year you and I were fourteen, we invented love …. the beginning of the breaking of me, and the making of you” - this literally sums up the entire book. Amazing.

This was a beautiful but difficult story. The writing it exemplary as would be expected from an author of Donoghue's skills.

Highly recommended to all

Learned by Heart by Emma Donnaghue
Having read and loved Room and The Pull of the Stars I knew that this book would be well written and it did not disappoint. I watched Gentleman Jack on television so I was familiar with the later life of Anne Lister but this deals with her life as a schoolgirl in York. This novel is the outcome of years of research into the writings of Anne Lister and other source material. It is the story of the love between Eliza Raine, an orphan heiress, sent to England from her home in India. Her father dies on the voyage over and we do not know what happens to her Indian mother.
She arrives in England and is ignored by her older sister. She is placed in a room at the school in York on her own until the whirlwind that is Anne Lister arrives at the school to share the room they name The Slope. They become involved in an intense relationship. It is obvious from the outset that Eliza’s life does not turn out well as part of the story is recounted in the form of letters sent from an asylum 10 years after their initial encounter. This is a beautifully written novel rich in historical detail and I will be recommending it to my various book groups. Many thanks to the author, the publishers and Net Galley for the opportunity to read it in return for an honest review.

'Learned by Heart' is historical/literary fiction by Emma Donoghue. Though at this point, she could write the blurb on the back of a cereal packet and I would still read it. Is there any topic this author cannot do well?

The story follows the school days of the tragic Eliza Raine and her burgeoning relationship with Ann Lister, history's most famous lesbian. It is believed that Eliza Raine had a hand in developing the Lister code, which took a team of internet code breakers years to decipher from Lister's diaries. The story is less about the plot and more about the vibes, very character driven as it draws you into the atmospherically close lives of the two girls at the manor house school and their exploration of their sexuality and what it means to be a Victorian woman. I really enjoyed it and was absorbed into their world as Raine bomes more and more obsessed with Ann.

4 stars - it was beautifully written and made me want to visit Shibden Hall and watch Gentleman Jack. I knew nothing really about Ann Lister before and it made me want to know more.

For those that have seen the historical TV series Gentleman Jack, the story of Anne Lister will not be new, but this book focuses on Lister’s first love during school, Eliza Raine and her declining mental health while she takes second place to Anne’s many lesbian relationships.
If you have read Emma Donoghue’s books before, you will know each of them are very different, both in style and subject matter. Her last book Haven, polarised readers because while it is stunningly written with beautifully descriptive language full of nuance, the storyline and pace were slow.
This is another book to savour. It is not a page turning thriller. Her writing though is perfect for a book set in the early 1800’s about early love, racism, and homosexuality. I have to admit I put it down several times to read something else in between before going back to it just because of extraordinary language and beauty of her writing.
As Emma says in her Afterword, she has been fascinated by Anne Lister for almost 30 years and has finally written a fictionalised account from the perspective of Eliza whom not much has been written about in the history books.

When facts meet fiction!

When I saw that Emma Donoghue had a new book coming out I got SO excited.

I recently read The Wonder and The Pull Of The Stars earlier in the year and enjoyed them and her writing. The way she writes historical fiction is brilliant and I’ve been wanting to get my hands on another book by her for a while so when I got approved for this on Net Galley I was stoked, to say the least!

Learned By Heart is inspired by the real-life diaries of Eliza Raine and Anne Lister written in the 1800s. Two girls who are both attending boarding school, Eliza an Anglo-Indian woman and Anne an English woman who because of her diaries has been dubbed ‘the first modern lesbian’.

The novel explores and expands those entries on their love affair and brings them and their struggles to life in a new way by flipping between their school years which is told in Eliza’s POV to Eliza’s letters to Anne 10 years later.

I didn’t know much about these two until I read this so of course I went and did a spot of research. The author's note at the end is insightful as well! These real-life diaries are so interesting and quite renowned within queer history. Most of them were written in code and they document Anne’s life and of course relationship with Eliza. There’s a TV show based on the same diaries called Gentlemen Jack!

Donoghue's fictional adaptation of sorts must have taken SO much research. I applaud Donoghue for how much effort this project must have taken but also a big bravo for crafting this into a novel.

Overall this is interesting to read. Even though I love historical fiction I sometimes struggle with this period especially slow-burn period pieces like this so I did struggle to get into it at first but that’s a personal thing. If you love your period drama and queer stories you will love this.

I am hesitating between 4 and 5 stars for this book. I love Emma Donaghue's books and this is no exception. Beautifully written, achingly poignant, I immersed myself in the world of Eliza. I knew nothing of either of the characters and only worked out it was based on real life people about half way through ( probably one of the few who hasn't watch Gentleman Jack) so it was simply a story to me about two young girls finding love. Eliza's fate was so sad and I winced at her poor treatment by Lister and the racism she experienced in early 1800s England. I've thought about it often since I finished it and I thunk this will stay with me for a long time.

Anne Lister has been much more widely known since the TV series Gentleman Jack came out and her diaries have certainly shed some light on the lives of lesbian/queer women in the 18th century. In her afterword Emma Donoghue tells the readers that she has been fascinated by the diaries ever since the first parts of it were decoded and so she wanted to contribute to the conversation in her own way. The book is about Lister but she is the not the only focus because the novel looks at all women of the 18th century and the way they were expected to conform to societal norms. Raine, the other protagonist, has an even more difficult life because she is also a person of colour. Throughout this very well written book the reader can feel what life was like for those who did not fit the mold, and who for various reasons (money, sex, colour) could not find a place in society. The love story in itself is heartbreaking and the author gives us some insight into the character of Lister, it foreshadows her life, shows her as groundbreaking but fallible and fickle and in many ways we see she behaves more like a man than a woman. To a certain extent all the women in this novel are victims, but unlike Lister, Raine cannot cope with this cruel reality and we can feel her slowly slipping away. If this topic interests you, you should definitely read Donoghue's novel and even if you know very little about it, it is a beautifully written love story in its own right.

Learned by Heart is the story of Eliza Raine, daughter of a East India company man and an Indian woman, a teenager growing up in what we would now call a boarding school, and her friendship with Anne Lister, which becomes first love and ends in heartbreak.
I went into this book not knowing anything about Anne Lister, so completely blind to this character that seems to be the model for tv show "Gentleman Jack" (which I have heard about).
Although I enjoyed the book, it was painfully slow, especially in the first half of it. The author clearly researched not only the character's lives, as she states in the author's note, but also life for a girl in a place like "The Manor (the school) in that time - it was truly a historical immersion into their daily lives, reading this book.
That being said, it was a bit dry because of it, so if whoever is reading this review isn't really into basically a portrayal of 1800s life, with a bit of a story, I wouldn't recommend it.
However, I cannot give this book anything less than 4 stars, because of all the research the author has done.
So all in all, maybe it just wasn't for me, but I can appreciate the work Donoghue put into this and feel like I have actually learned something from this.

Learned By Heart is a fictionalised account of Anne Lister’s (of Gentleman Jack fame) year at a girl’s boarding school, and specifically her burgeoning relationship with fellow pupil, Eliza Raine. Interspersed with the narrative set during their schools days (which is told from Eliza’s pov) are extracts from an adult Eliza’s letters to Anne.

Writing about real people - and real people who have already been fictionalised on television, no less, giving many readers a set idea of who Lister was - is always challenging but Donoghue does a superb job of combining primary sources with imagined events.

Overall, I very much enjoyed Learned By Heart and would recommend it to lovers of historic fiction and queer stories.

A tender exploration of what it is to love despite the odds. I love how personally the author feels about these womens lives and I love seeing Donoghue once again give life to a story that is all but forgotten.

I’m fascinated by Anne Lister having watched Gentleman Jack on TV and having read her transcribed diaries. While they concentrate on her adult years, Donoghue has chosen to write a novel based on Anne’s brief stay at boarding school in York whilst a teenager and her passionate affair with a fellow pupil, Eliza Raine. Both are ‘different’ - Anne with her masculine mannerisms and prodigious academic ability, Eliza with her mixed race (English/Indian) heritage.

This is a thoroughly researched novel. Donoghue employed a genealogist to uncover as much as she could about Eliza Raine’s life. She has researched York society and living conditions at the time (mainly 1805-06) and life at Manor House School. All this research authenticates her story telling but it also very often makes the novel feel like an assignment. Unlikely scenarios that add little to the storyline are created so that the author can use her research into, for example, horse racing, the Race Ball at the Assembly Rooms, and the Spring Fair. The descriptions feel like they’ve been lifted from her notes and the scenes written around them. It’s fair perhaps to argue that this is not unusual for authors of historical fiction but, in this case, it becomes such an obvious technique that I found it annoying.

It’s a slow read for the first half of the book but gets better as the girls are drawing closer together. Their passion for each other is described very thoughtfully and tenderly and is easily the best part of the book. After Anne leaves the school, however, I found it much less interesting and skim read to the end, something I hate doing. The long notes by the author on her research into Eliza are interesting but too long, in my opinion. I also feel that since she had so much more evidence about her adult life than about her teenage years, I might have found it a more interesting read if her adult life had been the subject.

I wouldn’t have missed reading this book and I’m glad I had the opportunity. It adds a little colour to the Anne Lister story but overall I was disappointed that I didn’t enjoy it more.

With thanks to NetGalley and Pan MacMillan for a review copy.

Like many others, i loved the tv show "Gentleman Jack", which first introduced me to Anne Lister. So when I read the synopsis for Emma Donoghue's most recent novel, 'Learned by Heart', I was immediately intrigued. Lister's first love, a tragic figure in the end. I knew next to nothing about her before picking up this book. I also haven't read anything by Donoghue before, though both Room and The Pull of the Stars are sitting happily on my bookshelves, begging me to stop buying new books and paying them more attention.

I really enjoyed the writing in this one. Donoghue is clearly a very skilled writer and storyteller, and her novel is very well researched, too. You can feel the care with which Donoghue handled Eliza's story in the page, the time and effort spent on learning all there is to know about her. It's a poignant slice-of-life story and a fictional account of two real people's first experiences with love. The story is told from Eliza's point of view, and while it's mostly linear in structure, there are later-in-life letters from Eliza to Lister added between chapters that give a glimpse into the future of their relationship and Eliza's life. It's narratively brilliant because the tone is so different from the story told of their teenage years.

We get to know Eliza at 14 years old, the daughter of a British father and an Indian mother that remains unnamed. Her heritage and the colour of her skin very much impact her life at the English boarding school in York where her caretakers sent her to be properly educated, and where she'll meet Anne Lister. She's part of the group of students, yet still isolated, and the novel isn't really subtle about the racism she has to endure constantly. Lister really becomes her anchor at school, and their friendship slowly develops into more.

Now, I wasn't entirely enamored with this novel. While I enjoyed the subject matter, Eliza is an incredibly interesting protagonist and Lister is fascinating even as a teenage girl, the pacing was just a tad too slow for my tastes. The story often felt meandering, with no clear goal in mind, which wasn't helped by focusing on the whole group of girls a little too much. The side characters weren't really that interesting, yet there were pages after pages of conversations with them that, in the end, didn't add much to the overall narrative or the characters. I was much more enthralled whenever Eliza and Lister were central in their scenes. There is also one particular scene that left me with a bit of a sour taste in my mouth, in which Lister engages in sex with a sleeping Eliza - while she does feel bad afterwards and Eliza doesn't mind because she's so very enamoured with her, it's a bit of a jarring lack of consent that came out of nowhere and, to me, is just not romantic at all.

All in all, a gorgeously written and narratively rich novel that is obviously very dear to the author's heart, which you can really feel on every single page. 4 stars,

Emma Donoghue returns to mining lesbian history for her exploration of the doomed relationship between Anne Lister and Eliza Raine. Lister’s become a famous figure mainly through the popularity of the drama Gentleman Jack based on her life and diaries. But here Donoghue trains her spotlight on Raine, Lister’s first love, who’s often been confined to a footnote in Lister’s biography. Raine, thought by many to be the inspiration behind the equally-tragic Bertha Mason in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, was born in India, the result of an affair or so-called “country marriage” between an English doctor employed by the East India Company and an unknown Indian woman. Sent to England as a young child, Raine was later enrolled in a boarding school in York where she met Lister, a fellow pupil.

Biracial, and now orphaned, Donoghue’s portrait of teenage Raine depicts her as someone who’s painfully isolated, hemmed in by constant reminders of her difference, her outsider status as just another of the despised “brown children” fathered by white men working in India. Schoolgirl Raine’s diffident and desperate to fit in, and this makes Lister’s forthright, confident personality a source of fascination. Lister is also an outsider but together they form a bond which makes school bearable, increasingly inseparable, their friendship is slowly transformed by love and growing desire. Donoghue’s dual narrative moves between a meticulous recreation of Raine’s regimented, school days and Raine ten years later, now locked away in the first in a series of asylums where she feverishly writes letters to a long-absent Lister, convinced they might somehow be reunited.

Donoghue’s beautifully-researched novel is an unusual variation on a coming-out story and a convincing examination of racism, social hierarchy, and the limits imposed by a society in which middle-class women are expected to take on the costume of stiflingly-conventional femininity. As a narrative it’s not always particularly subtle, and the level of detail shifts between compelling and overwhelming. But Donoghue’s considerable skill as a storyteller and Raine as her choice of subject made this a gripping, moving read.