The Surrogate is about extraordinary lives, painting and drama, love and sex, about winning and losing and creating and destroying. But mostly about perhaps the most beautiful woman in England who lived at the end of the nineteenth century and about how life always forces a person to change. The writer's search for the reality of Dorothy's life is metaphorical for the search for what drives her herself in life, in which the similarities between that ancient world of more than a hundred and twenty years ago and the present day turn out to be greater than expected.