Against Michelangelo

• BuyThe Pinecone by Jenny Uglow
  Faber, 332 pp, £20.00, September 2012, ISBN 978 0 571 26950 1

Not much is known about Sarah Losh and those biographical facts which have survived offer little more than a misleading series of clichés. Born on New Year’s Day, 1786, into a solid and prosperous county family in Cumbria, Sarah, or Sara as she first called herself, was the eldest of three surviving children. Wealthy, intelligent and good looking, she made her debut at the age of 18 at a ball in Carlisle where, family tradition had it, she was the belle of the evening. A drawing of her some years later shows an intelligent, conventionally pretty face, the hair piled up behind a centre parting, large eyes, small chin, a nose sharpening into middle age.