The Bohemian Girl

The Bohemian Girl (1988), Frances Vernon''s fourth novel, transports us to 1890s London to meet the young Diana Blentham, whom Vernon first introduced to readers - as a celebrated grande horizontale - in the opening pages of her 1982 debut Privileged Children.

Diana fears that the lot of an intelligent woman is to simply be married and never again open a book. Her father wonders - not incorrectly - if Diana''s brains may lead her ''to some grave lapse in good behaviour''. So it comes to pass one day when, riding on her bicycle in Battersea Park, she knocks over a handsome Irish painter...

''A pretty, witty little parable about Victorian values, and the hazards of being female and intelligent in a country as sexist and anti-intellectual as the United Kingdom... This romance has teeth... it bites the eternal issues of class, and sex, and freedom.'' Philip Howard, The Times