Three Women, Three Choices

Eleanor, Henriette, and Camille in The Year of Shadows

10 May 2026 ~ 4 min read

The Year of Shadows is often described as a novel about Poe and Berlioz. And it is. But the story wouldn’t exist without the three women who force both men to become who they’re meant to be. Eleanor Morel, Henriette Smithson, and Camille Moke each face the same fundamental question—what do you choose when love, ambition, and survival pull in different directions?—and each gives a completely different answer.

Eleanor was the character I built from the ground up. She’s fictional, inspired by the real pioneers of women’s medicine in an era when women were barred from medical schools in France except as patients or nurses. What drew me to her was the contradiction she carries: she’s a healer who’s fascinated by death, a scientist with a poet’s instincts, a woman fighting for a career that doesn’t officially exist yet. When Edgar starts calling her “Lenore”—intuiting her childhood nickname without knowing it—she doesn’t correct him. She lets the name stand because she recognizes what he sees in her: someone who walks between science and shadow. Her choice, when it comes, is devastating. A safe, respectable life with Raphael Bienaimé waits for her back home. Edgar offers complexity, danger, and a love deepened by shared hours in morgues and crime scenes. She chooses Edgar—and then, when he’s forced to leave France, she chooses medicine. She arrives at his farewell breakfast without luggage, and the answer is written in her empty arms. Her mother, watching her daughter leave for Paris, says it best: Eleanor has “the right to her own ruins.”

Henriette Smithson was real, and writing her meant honoring a woman history has often reduced to “Berlioz’s muse.” She was so much more than that. Her Ophelia and Juliet transformed how Shakespeare was performed in Paris, and offstage she fought for creative control against men like Charles Kemble who sought to limit and exploit her talent. In the novel, she receives Hector’s passionate letter after his first glimpse of her on stage and reads it with wonder, not alarm—this stranger has put into words something she recognizes about her own art. But she’s careful. She has to be. An actress’s reputation is her career, and she keeps her distance for months, communicating through formal, cautious letters. When she finally lets him in, it’s on her terms. The night of the Symphonie Fantastique premiere, Henriette sits in the audience and understands that Hector has transformed her into sound—not the woman, but the idea of her, the unreachable beloved. She recognizes the beauty and the danger of that, and she’s moved and unsettled in equal measure.

And then there’s Camille. She’s the one readers don’t expect to care about, and the one who surprised me most in the writing. Camille Moke is brilliant—a pianist of genuine talent—and she’s young and ambitious in a world that gives young women very few paths to power. Her affair with Hector during his summer at the château is passionate and real, not calculated. But when she ends it to marry Jacques Pleyel, the wealthy piano manufacturer, she’s making the choice her world has trained her to make: security over passion, money over music. It would be easy to write her as a villain. I didn’t want that. At the premiere, Camille flees the theater before the ovation—the music has shattered her composure because she recognizes herself not as the inspiration but as the wound. Later, alone in Vienna, the idée fixe slips into her playing unbidden, and she wonders whether the melody will follow her forever. That’s not villainy. That’s consequence.

Three women, three choices. Eleanor chooses her calling over love and carries Edgar’s letters—intercepted by her mother for twenty years—without knowing they exist. Henriette chooses to let a stranger’s obsession become something real, and eventually becomes not just Berlioz’s muse but his wife. Camille chooses safety, and spends the rest of her life hearing a melody she can’t escape in the silence between notes.

None of them chose wrong. That’s the part I wanted to get right. Every choice costs something. Every choice saves something. The novel doesn’t judge them—it just asks you to sit with what each woman gained and what she lost, and to notice that the men in their lives were shaped more by these women’s decisions than by anything they did themselves.

~ Liam