In a brilliant piece of detective work, Tomalin--whose book about Nelly Ternan, Charles Dickens's secret mistress, won prizes as the best biography of 1991--has retrieved Dora, her story and her world, from the obscurity of lost letters and unexamined documents. As social history, the tale is irresistible; as a love story with a painful and brutal ending, it is unforgettable.