Picador snaps up ‘touching’ new historical novel about Gentleman Jack from Donoghue

Picador has snapped up a “touching” new historical novel from Emma Donoghue, showcasing the real-life love story of Eliza Raine and Anne Lister, whose diaries were the inspiration for the BBC series “Gentleman Jack”. 

Ravi Mirchandani, editor in chief, acquired UK and audio rights to Learned by Heart from Caroline Davidson at CDLA. Picador will publish in August 2023. The book will be co-published by Judith Clain at Little, Brown and Company in the United States, and Iris Tupholme at Echo in Canada. 

Drawing on Donoghue’s years of investigation and Anne Lister’s five-million-word secret journal, Learned by Heart is the long-buried love story of Eliza Raine, an orphan heiress banished from India to England at age six, and Anne Lister, a brilliant, troublesome tomboy, who meet at the Manor School for young ladies in York in 1805. 

Mirchandani said: “Emma’s new novel returns to the subject of her first play – Anne ‘Gentleman Jack’ Lister – and to the themes that she has explored in all her fiction: the isolated, the orphaned and the ‘different’, whom she makes entirely, movingly, convincingly and three-dimensionally human. We are all at Picador delighted to be publishing this wonderful, touching, thought-provoking new novel, happy as clams to be continuing our happy, enjoyable and productive relationship with one of our most valued writers.” 

Donoghue added: “I’ve been obsessed with Anne Lister and Eliza Raine for the past three decades, so to be bringing their story to a worldwide audience with my dream team of HarperCollins Canada, Picador and Little, Brown is just fantastic.”