Book excerpt: In other people's eyes, Kitty van der Kleve is privileged. Despite her humble origins as an orphan and workhouse girl, she is now married to a gentleman of wealth and social standing in Victorian Tunbridge Wells. But Kitty would willingly change places with any of her admirers. There is one quality her husband, Oliver van der Kleve, can neither demand nor give, and that is love. Trapped in an ill-omened marriage, hated by Oliver's sister Beatrice, Kitty becomes increasingly unhappy. Her only consolation is free-spirited artist Jonathan Rivers. Inexorably, Kitty is drawn to him, little realising that what seems to be a route to happiness will lead to both tragedy and a new life. Set in the mid-nineteenth century The Imagination of the Heart is Judith Glover's fifth historical romance novel and bears the same superb qualities that marked her Sussex Quartet, The Stallion Man, Sisters and Brothers, To Everything a Season, and Birds in a Gilded Cage.