Idomen, or The Vale of Yumuri

In 1843, Maria Gowen Brooks, an American poet once compared to Byron and Swinburne, published a raw confession that had been burning inside her for two decades. Idomen is her memoir of a catastrophic love affair that began when she traveled through Canada with her young son, newly widowed and vulnerable. She met a man who swept her into passion, then abandoned her to near-madness and suicide. The book recounts these events with startling honesty, renaming everyone and calling herself Idomen, a Greek word meaning "we shall see," that becomes both a promise and a threat to the reader. This is not a dignified Victorian memoir of female suffering quietly borne. It is a document of romantic extremity, of a woman who stared into the abyss and wrote about it plainly. Brooks had inherited a Cuban plantation after her brother's death from malaria; she would return there after publishing Idomen and die of the same disease herself. The book endures because it captures something essential about love's capacity to destroy, rendered by a woman who refused to soften her own story into respectable silence.