The best description I can come up for this book is that I imagine librarians clutching it to their chest at the particularly "fevered" moments and whenever they have to pause from the book. I did love it, but the main story is not something EVERYBODY will even like: two university researchers, both experts in a certain poet, find (through old letters) that their poets might have been in love? Yes, it's not a tale for all. It was almost not a tale for me, someone who really cannot spend time on poetry (though I want to - it just makes me anxious that I'm not getting every layered meaning in so few words: my issues). A.S. Byatt does such an amazing, intricate and DIFFICULT job of not only creating her story and characters, but the poems and shorts stories and letters of two fictional and historically acclaimed poets. The story is good, and I loved it as I love Jane Austen novels and Victorian drama...but it is chaste and modest in its characters - all reserved intellectuals. Gets a little nutty at the end, but I went with it.