As a child Tabitha Baskett was remarkable for nothing but violence of ordinariness In young Victorian womanhood she fell prey to the impudent bounder Dick Bonser Folly and ruin might have been her fate, had the naughty nineties not arrived, and she founded a vanguard literary review and became the hub of the aesthetic movement If Tabitha hadn't had the urge to laugh at the most important and absurd junctures of her life, none of it might have happened this way