Evelyn Juers’ biographical essay focuses on Eliza Emily Donnithorne, long considered the model for Charles Dickens’s character Miss Havisham in Great Expectations. For most of her life she lived in isolation in a large house in the inner-Sydney suburb of Newtown. It was said that she had been jilted at the altar and become a recluse, wearing her wedding dress and keeping her wedding banquet set until the day she died. But who was she? The Recluse is the story of Juers’ quest to find the elusive Eliza Donnithorne, who was born in South Africa, and lived in India, England and Australia.
Evelyn Juers' previous book House of Exile: The Life and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann won the Prime Minister's Award for Non Fiction, and has been published in the US, UK, France and Spain.
