Love among the butterflies – The diaries of a wayward, determined and passionate Victorian lady –

“Margaret fountaine was a country clergyman’s daughter, born in 1862. Rejecting her conventional upbringing and being inpossession of a modest private income, she set out on a ‘wild and fearless’ life which took her all over the world.

Sometimes sad, often funny, always fascinating, her diaries, reproduced in this book, reveal a wonderfully irrepressible and exceptional woman who decided early in life to go her own way, and who went it with such charm and gusto that men fell like skittles. Thus – in additition to her fabulous butterfly collection – she netted, among other, an Egyptian ship’s officer, an aristocratic Hungarian, a Sicilian butterfly-hunter and a married Syrian dragoman with whom she spent twenty–eight years enjoying great happiness.”