She was beautiful. She was a musical genius. She was married to another prodigious musician, the conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim. Their fairy-tale marriage turned them into a royal musical couple.

In this definitive biography, Elizabeth Wilson, herself a cellist who knew Jacqueline du Pre in her playing days, charts du Pre's meteoric career from her early identification with the sound of the cello to the achievement of her stardom by her early twenties, when she became a legend virtually overnight.

For over a decade Jacqueline du Pre performed the cello repertory with all the best symphonic orchestras to standing-room-only houses around the world, and during those years she also recorded the entire cello literature. At the age of twenty-seven, however, Jackie was felled at the height of her career by multiple sclerosis. She died in 1987, leaving behind a rich and extraordinary musical legacy, and renowned as one of the best-loved musicians of the century.

The author details Jackie's passionate, tumultuous, complicated relationship with her sister Hilary, depicted in the current film Hilary and Jackie. She also examines the origins and nature of Jackie's extraordinary talent, assesses her lasting importance as an interpreter, and concludes her biography with a sensitive account of du Pre's tragic physical decline, when, no longer able to play, Jacqueline struggled bravely against the ravages of her unforgiving illness.