After buying an ancient stone house in Provence, journalist Sheryle Bagwell finds in her attic an old edition of selected letters by the seventeenth-century French noblewoman Madame de Sévigné, who died 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 Sévigné wrote hundreds of witty, acerbic-and heartfelt-letters from Paris and Brittany to her daughter who had moved to the chateau in Provence after marrying a count. Madame de Sévigné's correspondence has been hailed down the centuries by the likes of Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf, who described her as a 'genius of the art of speech'.

Sheryle soon falls under Madame de Sévigné's spell; she thinks of her as an early blogger when even proper newspapers had yet to emerge. But above all, Madame de Sévigné'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.