Rita Mae Brown is the New York Times bestselling author of the Mrs. Murphy mystery series (which she writes with her tiger cat, Sneaky Pie) and the Sister Jane novels, as well as Rubyfruit Jungle, In Her Day, The Six of One Trilogy, and The Sand Castle, among others, and of the memoirs Animal Magnetism and Rita Will. An Emmy-nominated screenwriter and a poet, Brown lives in Afton, Virginia, with cats, hounds, horses, and big red foxes.

Molly is as vivid and funny as Huckleberry Finn. Back in the late 1970s everyone in the Women's Collective at uni had read Rubyfruit, which is why Rita in Educating Rita is so named. It provoked snobbery then, and probably still now: a book that makes you laugh so much cannot be serious literature. But Rubyfruit has a lot of serious points to make and is great fun along the way