Kathleen ffrench lived a storybook life — a life of opulence in a world on the brink of destruction.The headstrong child of an Irish diplomat and a Russian heiress, she grew up on her family’s estates by the Volga, touring the capitals of Europe with barons and princesses, and visiting a home away from home: her father’s castle in Galway. Kathleen’s mercurial life was rich in trials and scandal: she suffered much heartache from the betrayals of her disturbed mother, and witnessed the atrocities of the Great War while serving in the Red Cross. In the 1917 Russian Revolution she was lucky to survive peasant uprisings and the brutality of Bolshevik prisons. Later she was the first woman to drive into Eastern Siberia, where she spent months searching for her missing lover. Drawing on the candid letters of Kathleen and her family, Jean Lombard’s deeply personal insights take readers into a vanished world, where the colourful people we meet are surprisingly like our own.


An Irish Woman in Czarist Russia
by Jean Lombard
Kathleen ffrench