In July 1841, the poet John Clare escaped a lunatic asylum and embarked on a four-day journey across East Anglia to find his adored wife and muse, Mary Joyce. But Mary had died three years earlier, a spinster, and Clare was toiling home to a truth he could never acknowledge.
 
Using Clare's brief account of his 85-mile trek—the 'Journey out of Essex’— as a guide, Ellis Hall and Bridget Somekh shed new light on the world in which it took place. Following in his footsteps, they seek out the remains of that world in the 21st century. With original verse, prose, maps, drawings and colour photographs, Love’s Cold Returning is an important addition to the canon of Clare scholarship.
 
"A lively narrative pitched somewhere between travelogue and detective novel... A sensitive portrait of Clare, along with a record of England’s changing landscape... Readers will learn an enormous amount, and Clare enthusiasts will appreciate the equal measures of passion and factual precision that Hall and Somekh pour into their hybrid, multifaceted book."
 
— TLS