"Fresca is detective story, cultural history and love story. It tells a tale of unconventionality, multifarious creativity, and a quest for new ways of living and loving amidst the complexities of Interwar Britain. For Francesca Allinson life and making art were synonymous, though both were cut short. Her story captures the topsy-turvy quality of a life singularly led; it shows how biography too gets turned upside down in the making - how the story of a single individual can throw the literary and social perspective of the period into relief. Helen Southworth's initial goal was to discover how Francesca's fictional autobiography, A Childhood, made it onto Leonard and Virginia Woolf's The Hogarth Press list in 1937. The result was to be immediately drawn in to the company of prominent artistic figures of the period"--