This is exactly the kind of romance novel I want from an ex-law professor with a graduate degree in theoretical physical chemistry. It is smart, historical, poignant and lovely. The romance in it reminded me of my own wonderful husband and both made me understand him a bit better and made me a bit braver. 
 It is about a scientist, inventing the study of inheritance a few decades early, in the 1860s. Because she is a woman, nobody will even read her ideas, and so she works with a man to get her ideas out there. And it is about this woman and what her world has made her into and what she has made herself into far more than it is about a romantic hero or even a romance. It is about other women, too: real women who might have achieved what Violet achieves, real women whose names, if recorded, were only recorded as the loving helpmeets of their respected husbands. 
 Even if you don't read romance, I think this is worth reading if you care about things like history or women in STEM. It isn't a bodice ripper. It's a love letter to those history never admitted existed.