After buying an ancient stone house in Provence, Australian journalist Sheryle Bagwell finds in her attic an old edition of selected letters by the seventeenth-century French noblewoman Madame de Sevigne, who died, she discovers, in the grand chateau down the road. So begins Sheryle’s new life in southern France as she deals with an ageing house, a combative neighbour and a foreign language-all infused with her reading of the glittering yet doomed world of Louis XIV’s France. Madame de Sevigne wrote hundreds of letters from Paris and Brittany to her beloved daughter who had moved to the chateau in Provence after marrying a count. Her heartfelt, yet witty, correspondence has been hailed down the centuries by the likes of Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf. Sheryle soon, too, falls under Madame de Sevigne’s spell; she thinks of her as an early blogger. But above all, the noblewoman’s ardent letters to her daughter prompt Sheryle to reflect on the life of her own long-dead mother, whose thwarted dreams of one day travelling to France she is now fulfilling.
