The Sunlight on the Garden: A Family in Love, War and Madness

In 1880, housemaid Ada Curtis bore the first of several illegitimate children from her employer, the son of a once-grand family obsessed with its own threadbare nobility. More than a century later, Elizabeth Speller—Ada's great-granddaughter—became inspired by the stories, reinventions, and half-truths in her family's past to set her own record straight. This passionate and intriguing memoir brings to life the hopes and failures of four generations of a family filled with tales of wealth inherited and lost, sexual indiscretion, and closely guarded secrets. A recurrence of madness is also uncovered—Ada Curtis went mad not long after conceiving her children, and Elizabeth herself experienced a mental breakdown—exposing a troubling thread that links together decades of an intimate but troubled family.