What with pre-nuptial arrangements, palimony, child custody, we have become accustomed to the short-lived, high octane relationships on which glossy magazines feed.
Donne's father died suddenly in 1576, and left the three children to be raised by their mother, Elizabeth, the daughter of John Heywood, epigrammatist, and a relative of Sir Thomas More.
This novel was writen in his later lifePip, a boy of the marshes, is being "raised by hand" by his shrieking harridan of an older sister and her seemingly doltish husband, the blacksmith Joe Gargery.