The year is 1875, and John Ruskin is losing his mind. The celebrated art critic, the revered Professor of Art, the author of countless books, the campaigner for social reform, the man who taught a generation to see, finds himself stumbling blindly in the wake of a terrible grief: the madness and death of a young woman he once loved. Following Ruskin from candlelit séances in country houses to the dazzling palazzos of Venice to the rainswept hills of the Lake District, Victoria MacKenzie captures the exquisite anguish of a man who was astonishingly vibrant and alive in his work, and yet whose attempts at intimacy were hopelessly thwarted. Beautiful, haunting and heartbreaking, *Each Leaf, Each Curve of Stem* is an unforgettable portrait of longing, madness, grief – and the redemptions of art and the natural world.
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