le remarkable year when Henry David Thoreau and his brother John fall in love with the same girl; reclusive writer Nathaniel Hawthorne courts Sophia Peabody of the esteemed Peabody family; and the brilliant Margaret Fuller becomes a houseguest of the equally brilliant but married Ralph Waldo Emerson and finds herself engaged in a passionate affair of the mind as well as the heart. Today, these figures are icons of American literature but once they were young and in love.