Queen Bee of Tuscany

"Quite simply one of the best books of the year." —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Ben Downing's Queen Bee of Tuscany 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 eighteen 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