Jessica Levine is the author of The Geometry of Love (She Writes Press, 2014), a top-ten women’s fiction title in the American Library Association’s Booklist in 2015, and Nothing Forgotten (She Writes Press, 2018), which won the Next Generation Indie Book Award. The prequel to these two novels, Three Cousins, is forthcoming from She Writes Press in April of 2025. She is also the author of Delicate Pursuit: Discretion in Henry James and Edith Wharton (Routledge, 2002). Her essays, short stories, and poetry have appeared in many publications including The Southern Review and The Huffington Post. She has translated several books from French and Italian into English.

Jessica holds a PhD in English literature from the University of California at Berkeley, where she was a Mellon Fellow. She was born in New York City and now lives in Northern California. You can find her at www.jessicalevine.com. Jessica has been a practicing hypnotherapist since 2005. You can learn about her work at www.levinehypnotherapy.com.

Why is it easier for a woman to be a muse than to have one? Are security and inspiration mutually exclusive? Can one be fully creative—in art or life—without the inspiration of erotic love? These are the questions asked in THE GEOMETRY OF LOVE, a novel set in New York in the 1980s, then fast-forwarding to Northern California 20 years later.

Julia, an aspiring poet, is living with her British boyfriend Ben, a restrained professor at Princeton, when she is thrown off-balance by a chance meeting in Manhattan with Michael, a long-ago friend. A complex and compelling composer, Michael was once a catalyzing muse for her, but now returns as a destabilizing influence.

Julia longs to become involved with Michael, but feels enormous guilt at the thought of betraying Ben and giving up the security of that relationship. When Michael signals he is too wounded to make a commitment, Julia turns her triangular situation into a square by setting him up with a cousin. In the process she discovers, as Pascal once said, that “the heart has its reasons which reason does not know.” This deeply psychological tale explores the surprising ways we make romantic choices.

When Anna, now living in California, is contacted by the Italian lover she knew decades before, she recalls their affair and the child she gave up for adoption. As the episode returns to haunt her—threatening the life she’s built, including her marriage—the story moves back in time to her youth in Europe.

Rome, 1979. Anna, twenty-two and living abroad, is involved with a man already engaged to be married. When she meets and befriends his fiancée, she is forced to confront the moral consequences of her actions. But an unexpected pregnancy, an anonymous letter, and threatening relatives complicate the picture. A novel in which an unconventional heroine, far from home, is forced to reckon with the judgment of others.