Tennyson’s Gift is more than a book to me. It represents a period of joyful creativity, when strands of research into a group of artistic Victorians came together in a miraculous kind of way.

The book is set at Freshwater Bay on the Isle of Wight in July 1864, at a time when Julia Margaret Cameron (photographer) was just coming to grips with her art, and Alfred and Emily Tennyson lived nearby at Farringford. To write the book I would decamp for several weeks at a time from my house in Brighton to a holiday flat at Freshwater (with a terrific view of the bay), with a car full of books and a heavy Apple Macintosh computer/printer combo. The holiday flats had a public pay-phone in the entrance hall. Other than that, I was cut off from the outside world.

Over the course of writing Tennyson’s Gift, I fell in love, lastingly, with the Isle of Wight, and also with all the figures included in the book: Ellen Terry, George Frederic Watts and Lewis Carroll, as well as the Camerons and the Tennysons.