Charlotte Bingham

Fresh from convent school, Charlotte Bingham finds herself propelled from the private tortures of dancing class to the very public horrors of The Season. Though desperately on the hunt for a Superman to call her own, the freezing country house ballroom circuit seems to yield nothing but an inexhaustible crop of charmless, chinless young types known as Weeds.

But Charlotte's adventures are more than sufficiently diverting: whether she's bouffing up her hair to try and pass herself off as a beatnik, fighting off unwelcome advances in the back of a cab, hurtling down the Champs Elysées on the back of a Vespa, or accidentally sticking her eyelids together with eyelash glue while at modelling school, her experiments in coming-of-age are never short of intrigue - and disaster.

Published in 1963 when she was just nineteen, Bingham's sparkling memoir of her trials and travails became an international bestseller. From its pages emerges a deeply lovable and relentlessly optimistic young woman, looking for love in all the wrong places.

First published: Tuesday 1st January 1963