The World Before Her — Deborah Weisgall

It is 1880 when Marian Evans -- pen name George Eliot -- comes to Venice on her honeymoon with John Cross, who is twenty years her junior. She wants to start again, to forget her grief over the death of George Henry Lewes, with whom she shared twenty-five years of unwedded bliss and literary collaboration; she wants to give herself a proper happy ending, happier even than the one she provided for Dorothea Brooke, heroine of Middlemarch.

A century later, sculptor Caroline Spingold takes us to Venice again. She had been happy in that city one childhood summer spent with her parents, and feared returning. But now her powerful, wealthy, older husband has brought her back, against her will, to celebrate their tenth wedding anniversary.

A novel of art, love, and the challenges of marriage, The World Before Her tells of two women, their surprising similarities, and the reckoning this city of canals and bridges will force them to make with their desire, their memories, their very selves.