forelsket

A love story from the 1920s, traced a century later across the English Fens.

Forelsket (Another Place Press, 2024). Sold out at the publisher final few copies available direct. Email to purchase.

Straight road to flat horizon with a telegraph pole and a lone tree.
Street nameplate reading Love Lane next to a Give way sign.
A young woman standing in a room with wooden display cabinets.
A window at night with posters explaining what to do if a baby bird is found.
Starlings flying in a murmuration above a leafless tree at dusk.
A concrete pillbox in a green field with love hearts graffiti on the wall.
A blue table with an artificial flower display on it.
The view from an upstairs window looking out over rooftops.
Tables and chairs  with soft toys set up for Sunday school.
A ferris wheel viewed through a bus shelter window.
A row of trees curve around a road in a flat landscape.
A pink motel with a light illuminating a door at dusk.
Vase of flowers behind a window with a peeling painted frame.
Small stream with grassy banks winds towards the sea.
Steps leading up to Skegness pier from the beach.
Partially finished jigsaw puzzle of vase of flowers on table.

In the 1920s, my grandmother Cecily Nash was briefly engaged to the writer Christopher Marlowe. Their romance was short-lived, ending in a broken engagement, but its traces endure — in an inscribed copy of his book The Fen Country, in family memory, and in the landscape of the English Fens that he loved and described so vividly.

A century later, between 2020 and 2023, I retraced their story with a camera, using Marlowe’s book as a guide. What began as a fragment of family history became a meditation on love, loss, and memory — how decisions echo through generations, and how places can hold the weight of personal and collective histories.

Forelsket (published in 2024 by Another Place Press) reflects on this fragile inheritance: a failed romance in the shadow of war, a landscape haunted by absence, and the enduring search for connection that threads across time.