Dinitia Smith's spellbinding novel recounts George Eliot's honeymoon in Venice in June 1880, following her marriage to a handsome young man twenty years her junior. When she agreed to marry John Walter Cross, Eliot was recovering from the death of George Henry Lewes, her beloved companion of twenty-six years. Eliot was bereft: left at the age of sixty to contemplate profound questions about her physical decline, her fading appeal, and the prospect of loneliness. The Honeymoon explores different kinds of love, and of the possibilities of redemption and happiness even in an imperfect union.