"That a blighted love lies at the heart of many of Swinburne's works has long impelled scholars and biographers to search for details as to the who, the where, and the when of the affair. The first candidate was nomi- nated by Edmund Gosse and Thomas James Wise and was supposed to be a young miss, a Jane "Boo" Faulkner. Her candidacy, however, withered under the scrutiny of John Mayfield and Cecil Y. Lang, and a substitute was found: the poet's first cousin Mary Charlotte Julia Gordon Leith (1840-1926), a writer who married a military man, Col. Robert William Disney Leith, and whose suggestive correspondence with Swinburne flourished after her husband died in 1892..."