The toast of the Kit-Cat Club - Linda France

Linda France's latest poetry book is an adventurous cross-genre biography, an intimate life of the 18th-century writer, traveller, polemicist and rebel, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Each of her eleven chapters has a prose introduction to set the scene and time, followed by a sequence of poems in which Lady Mary takes centre stage. Inviting the reader into her world, she reveals her unbridled appetite for life, love and learning, as well as her fascination for detail and the foibles of human nature from Nottingham to Constantinople. Isobel Grundy, Lady Mary's biographer, writes in her foreword: 'Who would have thought you could catch a person, a lifetime, in about sixty poems...Each poem addresses a moment, offers a piercing insight, opens a window and leaves the different possibilities blowing through...I love the woman they're written about, and I find this tribute from one writer to another both dazzling and moving.'