London, 1865: Literally plucked from the street, Alice Wilding finds herself the silent audience to the most turbulent years of the life of bohemian artist, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. As his dumb muse, she witnesses infidelity, madness, forgery, lust, theft and death. A Curl of Copper and Pearl is a memoir of the lives of others in a world where truth is reliant on who is painting the picture.