Ophelia’s Fan, a novel by Christine Balint, traces the life of the Irish Shakesperean actress Harriet Smithson, who inspired Hector Berlioz to write his Symphonie Fantastique. The novel is conceived as memories set down by Smithson when she is in her forties, so that Louis, her son with Berlioz, can truly understand his mother as she was before the weakening of her body and spirit. (It is also intercut with passages narrated by the characters Smithson played – Anne Boleyn, Desdemona, Juliette, Ophelia, and others – retelling their famous stories from a uniquely personal perspective.)

In the book’s back pages Balint writes of her fascination with Harriet Smithson, a woman and artist who had been “immortalized by music yet overlooked by history.” Indeed, this thoroughly researched work makes a case for Smithson’s having been a major force in the French Romantic movement. Balint lovingly recreates Smithson’s girlhood in Ireland, her boarding school days, her apprenticeship and training in the theater – conjuring up a sensuous and now-vanished world in all its sumptuous and gritty details (likewise her imaginings of Desdemona and other characters, which give these oft-told tales a startling immediacy).

The last part of the book is devoted to Smithson and Berlioz’s tumultuous courtship. Still, something feels missing. The letters Smithson writes to her son, which bookend the chapters, are full of references to love and dignity now lost, to a troubled passion, to differences unreconciled. These imagined missives suggest all sorts of questions about Smithson and Berlioz that go unanswered – chief among them, what happens when two headstrong and talented people collide?

In effect, what seems like the heart of the story takes place off-stage. In many ways, though, this is to Balint’s credit for if her writing were not so involving and richly imagined, her readers might not still be longing for the rest of the story.