Lives Illuminated is a collection of essays that combines Saxon Henry's passions of traveling, reading, and creative nonfiction. As an intentional traveler, she visits places in order to feel into the past and plumb the lives of the historical figures who have lived in the locales. She has explored Giuditta Pasta's world on Lake Como; taken in Horace Walpole's Gothic visions at Strawberry Hill near London; followed Johann Wolfgang von Goethe through his hometown of Frankfurt; grown curious about Marie Louise of Austria in Parma and Consuelo Vanderbilt in Newport; plumbed Edith Wharton's heartbreak in New Haven; marveled at the life Djuna Barnes chose to lead during her last four decades in New York City; trekked through the Jazz Age with the Fitzgeralds by way of their last residence as a family in Montgomery; and learned a great deal about a nature-loving Colette, a brazen Natalie Clifford Barney, and a wise King Charles V in Paris. Each of these stories reveals aspects of the lives being illuminated that show each character in a surprising light.