Book excerpt: In the early 1800s in a small village in rural France, a peasant woman named Louise summons her priest. Fearing she is about to die, Louise begins her final confession to the bored cleric and reveals a lifelong secret involving a famous woman writer, a young English poet, and a wicked and unusual crime. Inspired by the lives and loves of the eighteenth-century pioneer of women's rights, Mary Wollstonecraft, and her contemporary, William Wordsworth, Fair Exchange is a spellbinding and sensual novel of passion and guilt.