Claude Vallier grows up in a household where education is a privilege distributed by sex. Her brothers attend lessons; she listens at the door. Her father conducts medical consultations in the next room; she memorises every word. She watches her uncle Henri — a man who never raises his voice — move wealth, silence opponents, and determine outcomes through information alone. She files the lesson away.

At thirteen, she forges her father's signature. The document exposes her fiancé's colonial insurance fraud with enough precision to end him. The investigation concludes with his execution. Claude understands, for the first time, exactly what knowledge is worth.

At Montpellier she persuades her brother Lucien to bring her along. While he enjoys every freedom the university extends to men, she completes the medical education — quietly, completely, in disguise. When they leave, she carries the degree. He carries the name.

As Dr Claude Bonhomme, she builds one of France's most respected practices. Her patients are women dismissed by every other physician, and they repay her attention with trust — the private conflicts inside their marriages, their estates, their families. Claude listens as a doctor. She acts as Henri taught her: precisely, invisibly, removing those who stand between her and the inheritance she was never meant to receive, redirecting the fortune toward the hospital she intends to build.

The arrest comes after she performs an illegal abortion to save a young woman's life. Dr Bonhomme is condemned to death.

Rosalind McKenna — Writer · Producer · Founder

Rosalind McKenna is a British writer and producer based in France. Her professional background spans film production, studio management and screenwriting, giving her experience of both the creative and practical realities of bringing screen projects to production.

She previously founded and ran Silver Road Studios in London, a film and television production facility whose clients included the BBC, Disney, ITV, Channel 4 and National Geographic.

As a producer, she produced the feature film Breaking Down (2014) and has an IMDb profile.

She is currently developing a slate of original film and television projects through Silver Road Media, including Flocking Pixels, The Fourth Lineage, Letters from the Condemned and Wait for Me.

Letters from the Condemned began with a question about authority: why does the same knowledge, the same ability and the same education become acceptable only when presented through the right identity? The story of a woman who spent three decades living as a man to practise medicine is not simply a historical curiosity. It is a precise illustration of how professional exclusion operates — and of the extraordinary lengths to which exceptional people are driven when legitimate routes are closed to them. The project draws on McKenna's longstanding interest in hidden female achievement, the structures that determined whose abilities were permitted to exist publicly, and the moral complexity of survival within systems designed to exclude.