When Victor Hugo died in 1885, the world was shocked to discover that he had a lone survivor: his daughter Adßele, incarcerated in an asylum for insane gentlewomen. Adßele Hugo was an accomplished, intelligent, and ambitious young woman whose potential shrank with every year spent under her tyrannical father's roof. At thirty-three, she fell desperately in love with an English soldier who was only interested in her money. Leslie Smith Dow recounts Adßele's nine-year pursuit of her unwilling lover from Guernsey to Halifax to Barbados, her return to her father's sphere, and the progressive schizophrenia that finally incapacitated her. Smith Dow bases Adßele's stranger-than-fiction history on her bizarre diaries, her family's letters, and the testimony of eyewitnesses.