The 'Journey' that Countess Sternberg describes is more spell binding than any traveller's tale. The author was born into an aristocratic family in Schleswig-Holstein and brought up in an enchantingly beautiful house decorated by Angelica Kaufmann. She moved as a young girl to live with her grandmother in Vienna still regulated, for people like her, by the strictest protocol of a society obsessed with birth and pedigree. She escaped this maze of convention when she fell in love with the dashing Count Leopold Sternberg and was married at the age of eighteen. A Bohemian nobleman whose vast estates and ancient lineage could satisfy the most critical, Count Leopold was also a man of tremendous courage, blessed with an unquenchable humor and vitality with a total lack of self-consciousness or self importance.

Their early married years at the ancestral home, Castolovice, form the first movement in an account of stunning poignancy and romance. As a young wife, the author found herself mistress of two castles and a palace in Vienna. Life on the great estates of central Europe was still, in some respects, much as it had been before the French Revolution. Her sharp, observant, unsentimental eye is turned on all the material circumstances of a way of life that now seems infinitely remote, but her vision does not stop short at picturesque or shocking details of extravagance and display.

The ideas and attitudes, the morals and the social habits of the old order are subjected to an equally candid though uncritical appraisal. The author is no puritan, and disdains cant as she disdains moralizing. The result is an account whose truthfulness comes home to every reader in a hundred shrewd insights into human nature.

Since European aristocracy was in general older than the boundaries of nation states, its families had connections from one end of the continent to the other. Rome and France, Scotland and Germany, Spain and Hungary, as well as Austria and Czechoslovakia contained castle-owning cousins. Whatever the narrowness of caste there was at least no provincialism of language or culture. And individualism well beyond the bounds of eccentricity was accepted without question. A notable example was her Aunt Diana who lived alone in a fisherman's hut on an island to which one drove in a trap along sand banks that were covered even at low tide.

During the war, under the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, the Sternbergs and their young daughter Diana were forced to move from Castolovice and lived in Prague. When, in 1945 they could return they again entertained nobility and diplomats in the splendid style that tradition demanded. But the Russian grip was tightening, and the Sternbergs knew that these glorious days were numbered. They left the country in 1948 carrying only what they could carry in a few suitcases.

Their subsequent adventures in France and America and Jamaica complimented by contrast the first part of their lives. They knew insecurity, poverty even squalor. Thanks partly to their courage and humour and partly to the author's training as a ceramic artist, they came, after stormy seas, to a safe anchorage. This frank story of a truly extraordinary woman cannot help but make one of the most absorbing and romantic autobiographies of the twentieth centuries.