'A hilarious, hugely enjoyable life of a Victorian eccentric.' Sunday Times, Summer Reading

'In 1889, Mrs Georgina Weldon, with a monkey called Titileehee, fled London and her lesbian lover, turned up at a convent in France and settled there for twelve years during which she wrote six volumes of preposterous autobiography. Her life, filled with incident (as Lady Bracknell might have disapprovingly described it), would have been a gift to Dickens. One of the lost voices of Victorian Woman, though only death could silence her garrulous pamphleteering, litigation and provocative egotism, now sings again, thanks to Thompson's wonderfully comic account.' IAIN FINLAYSON, The Times

'Georgina Weldon's life is a story so richly worth telling as to make the common run of biographies, with their high-achieving protagonists seem sadly dull. Thompson has distilled what he describes as her six volumes of incoherent self-justification, scandal-mongering, invective and misinformation into a life that is at once vastly entertaining and intelligently, uncensoriously illuminating of some of the murkier corners of Victorian society. His touch is deliciously light: Georgina's tyrannical father found nothing to interest him in Florence, his home for twelve years, except Dante, whom he studied "presumably for the pleasure of seeing sinners punished". Elegant in style, at once sensational and substantial in content, this book is a surprise and delight.' LUCY HUGHES-HALLETT, Sunday Times