Queen bee of Tuscany: the redoubtable Janet Ross (First edition.)

This title brings an extraordinary Victorian back to life.

Born into a distinguished intellectual family and raised among luminaries such as Dickens and Thackeray, Janet Ross married at 18 and went to live in Egypt.

There, for the next six years, she wrote for the London Times, hobnobbed with the developer of the Suez Canal, and humiliated pashas in horse races.

In 1867 she moved to Florence, where she spent the remaining 60 years of her life writing a series of books and hosting a colourful miscellany of friends and neighbours.

This book is a biography of her life and work.