“This author of historical novels would seem to have a rich ancestral seam to mine. But, as she reveals in this refreshingly frank, witty, eloquent memoir-cum-biography-cum-rumination, it isn’t that easy.” – Saga Magazine

Part memoir, part biography, and part book about creative writing and what really makes a novel, This Is Not A Book About Charles Darwin is the story of how a creative disaster came from ten generations of creative thinkers in the Darwin-Wedgwood family tree.

Books about Charles Darwin and his wife and cousin Emma Wedgwood are legion, but when Emma eventually gave in to the idea that she should write a novel about her family, she knew she wanted to take the road less travelled: there were the fascinating real lives of Erasmus Darwin and the Lunar Society; Tom Wedgwood, the first photographer; Julia Wedgwood, who as a writer and intellectual was ranked with George Eliot; Ralph Vaughan Williams and his extraordinary love story; and poet and Communist John Cornford, first Briton to be killed in the Spanish Civil War.

But even when she invented a fictional character and slid her into the complex lives of Charles Darwin’s grandchildren, Emma struggled with the factual and emotional truths that seemed to dictate what fiction she “could” and “couldn’t” write. How, among these riches, could she ever find space to create something that would be truly her own?

Writing the novel became a fierce struggle between Emma’s heritage and her identity as a writer – and ultimately a struggle that nearly killed her. When she was better, she realised the only way to write about the creative lives of her family was through the lens of her own creative struggle, telling the story of her journey through her family as she tried – and failed – to write the novel.