It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. A Tale of Two Cities, Dickenss only historical novel, sets personal happiness against the terrors of the French Revolution where the search for social justice sacrifices individual rights. Dr Manette has emerged from eighteen years unjust imprisonment in the Bastille: by an ironic twist of fate, his daughter Lucies marriage draws the family into a terrifying web of circumstance which, it seems, can only end in death...
The novel opens in England in 1915, at the deathbed of Dorothy Townsend, a suffragist and one of the first women to integrate Cambridge University. Her decision to starve herself for the cause informs and echoes in the later, overlapping narratives of her descendants. Among them are her daughter Evie, who becomes a professor of chemistry at Barnard College in the middle of the century and never marries...
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