Emily Soldene was a singer in the late nineteenth-century, and a star on the English-speaking stage sharing a concert platform with such operatic stars as Sims Reeves, Carlotta Patti and Santley, taking Bizet's brand new Carmen to the British provinces, and stunning both sides of the world with her vivacious performances in oprra-bouffe and comic opera. She was also a star in the heyday of the British music hall, of Christmas pantomime and even of the underclad American burleycue stage. An actress, too, a producer and a director, a theatre manager, a playwright and a novelist, a journalist and a high-flying gossip columnist, and at the same time a wife and four times a mother. And the author of the most colourful and scandalous memoir of the Victorian stage ever written.