What's a girl of fourteen to do when she finds herself alone in the world with no one to guide her? Why, follow the Victorian self-help guide, A Young Lady's Miscellany, of course! The trouble is, the advice it offers proves less than helpful in a modern context. Muddling through, often with disastrous results, she finds a friend in her recently widowed grandmother, the door to whose small house is always open. Inept at any job she is able to get and pursued by a slew of unsuitable suitors, she must instead spend a decade navigating her own miscellany in order to come of age. 'A wonderful account, perhaps the best I've ever read, of a female coming into her own' Tony Connor, Fellow, Royal Society of Literature