Letter from Provence

Name: Letter from Provence
Price: 34.99 AUD
Availability: InStock
ISBN: 9781761473531

Two women, two centuries, and a village house in France

Sheryle Bagwell

$34.99

Paperback

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English

Allen & Unwin
03 March 2026

Memoirs; Travel & holiday

'A tale of enduring love replete with hope.' Geraldine Doogue

After buying an ancient stone house in Provence, Australian journalist Sheryle Bagwell finds in her attic an old edition of selected letters by the seventeenth-century French noblewoman Madame de Sévigné, who died, she discovers, 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 letters from Paris and Brittany to her beloved daughter who had moved to the chateau in Provence after marrying a count. Her heartfelt, yet witty, correspondence has been hailed down the centuries by the likes of Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf.

Sheryle soon, too, falls under Madame de Sévigné's spell; she thinks of her as an early blogger. But above all, the noblewoman'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.

'The hopes and dreams passed between mothers and daughters. A beautiful book, compulsively readable.' Susan Johnson, author of Aphrodite's Breath

By: Sheryle Bagwell
Imprint: Allen & Unwin
Country of Publication: Australia
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 153mm,
ISBN: 9781761473531
ISBN 10: 1761473530
Pages: 304
Publication Date: 03 March 2026
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Sheryle Bagwell is an award-winning journalist and broadcaster. She has lived and worked in Australia and Europe for more than thirty years and is the author of My French Connection (HarperCollins, 2006). Sheryle and her husband now divide their time between Sydney and their village house in Provence.