Lady of the Butterflies

The protagonist of Fiona Mountain's debut historical novel Lady of the Butterflies (#23) is based on a real person, Eleanor Glanville.  Eleanor lived in Restoration England and left her mark on the study of butterflies through notes and specimens that are included in the British Museum's collection and through the Glanville Fritillary butterfly, which is named for her. 

Normally I love finding out about obscure historical figures and their lives.  So after I had read about a quarter of the way through Lady of the Butterflies' five hundred plus pages, I Googled Eleanor Glanville to see if there was a portrait of her available on line and some more concrete information.  No luck on the portrait, but I did find a lovely photo of Tickenham Court, her home.  I also found two British websites with snippets of information on Eleanor Glanville and citations of articles written about her in British Entomology publications.  And that was my mistake.  What I discovered was that the name and butterfly connection was accurate, as well as the name of her home estate, and that she did, in fact, have two husbands, named Edmund Ashville and Richard Glanville. But that was the extent of it. It left me feeling very ambivalent about this novel.  It bothered me that the little that is known about  Eleanor did not jibe with Ms. Mountain's book.  Yes, she does say that the ending of the book is her own flight of fancy, but that gives the impression that the rest of the book is substantially true.  I wish she'd simply written a novel that took the time and place of Eleanor's life and her pursuit of butterflies and transformed it into a work of fiction with differently named characters, where I could have been totally comfortable with the fictional story she weaves.  It's interesting enough, but I could never separate the ficitonal Eleanor's obsession with the men in her life from the real Eleanor's life.  I could not reconcile the two different Eleanors I now had in my head.

If you decide to read this book for yourself, do yourself a favor and treat it as a pure work of fiction, and if you're like me, don't research Eleanor Glanville and her world until after you finish the book.