Another version of the Wollstonecraft/Godwin/Shelley/Byron/Keats tangle; I'm not surprised that I can enjoy several, but it is surprising that this very realist, historical version lies so comfortably in my memory next to ' fantastic one.
I don't know about the title, though... there are passions aplenty, but they all founder on the reef of money. It's not just the women who suffer the more the less they have 'five hundred pounds a year and a room of [their] own'. The men, no matter how artistic, are almost all warped by their desire for inherited or patronage money. Not all: is born too poor and dead too soon to live for expectations. I can't tell how much of this is just a bad gamble on the quick payoff, and how much is because inherited money is more respectable in a way they haven't rejected with sexual and political respectability, and how much because working for a living was even harder in their day than ours.
Morgan's prose is delightful -- tremendously varied -- Caroline Lamb has a Mad Scene during a waltz, and it is subtly in triple-time; propulsive, dizzy, intoxicating. Her interactions with her family are little plays. The Marys exist in careful reasoned prose, Augusta Byron in slightly imagist thoughts, often a little behind events.
For those who can't remember -- the ending is not as tragic as it seems, through most of the book, that it must be.
Find in a Library: Passion
So wrote clew in Fiction (21st c.).