Other fictional characters based on historical people[2] are Donne's wife Ann More, the diarist Samuel Pepys, the fisherman Izaak Walton and, appearing briefly, Christopher Wren.

Piecing together the story she finds in her father's love poems, she identifies with her mother and invents a fiction about their lives.

When her father tries to place his two sons in careers and arrange marriages for his five daughters, Pegge defies him, seeking a passion to equal his.

The metaphysical conceit is a far-fetched comparison, as when Donne, in his poem "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning", compares two separated lovers to a geometry compass with its legs roaming apart.

[6] Several critics, including Edward O'Connor[1] and Gudrun Will, have pointed out that Novik's novel is itself a conceit, "in the best literary sense of the word".