Since 1996 when my first trip to Venice rearranged my interior life, I have been visiting the city and learning everything I can about it. Most of my reading led me to men’s history, but with some digging, I uncovered the stories of Venice’s inspired, undaunted, hardworking women. Their proto-feminism motivated me to share their stories with others in an attempt to redefine beauty. I’ve also created videos showing sites connected to these women’s lives, and I’ve written four books about Venetians, including extensive research into Giacomo Casanova and two anthologies celebrating Venetian life. Reading and writing about Venice helps me connect more deeply with my favorite city.
A stately woman in a brocade gown steps off a golden boat. A mirror merchant takes action to preserve her republic. An elegant singer poses in a private salon. Standing at a university podium, a woman promotes women’s education. A cloistered nun uses the only power she has—her pen. Artists hold in their hands pastels or pens or glass or thread to document or protect or adorn those around them.
All these women represent Venice, Italy’s city of water and light. Libraries of books have been written about Venetian history and men’s roles in shaping it. But little is written about the lives of its women. In this book you’ll read their stories. Beautiful women, each in her own way.
Elena Cornaro Piscopia holds the title as the first woman in the world to earn a university degree. But she earned it at great cost, and her story breaks my heart every time I recount it to others.
Guernsey pulled me into Elena’s fraught life, from her early intellectual curiosity and prowess, to her self-flagellation after being paraded around as a prodigy. Elena loved learning but hated the spotlight. Her experiences encapsulate what many Early-Modern women had to offer—and had to endure—yet her fortitude ultimately spotlights her resilience and can inspire others.
This historical fiction novel formed Anna Maria dal Violin into a real person for me and inspired me to humanize every woman I wrote about in my own book.
Anna Maria was abandoned at the church of the Pieta in Venice where she was taught to sing and play numerous instruments. She became a violin virtuoso and a favorite of Vivaldi, who wrote pieces specifically to challenge her.
Barbara Quick takes this real story and makes both Anna Maria and Venice live brightly in eighteenth-century Venice.
Fourteen-year-old Anna Maria, abandoned at the Ospedale della Pieta as an infant, is determined to find out who she is and where she came from. Her quest takes her beyond the cloister walls into the complex tapestry of Venetian society, from the impoverished alleyways of the Jewish Ghetto to a masked ball in the company of a king; from the passionate communal life of adolescent girls competing for their maestro's favor to the larger-than-life world of music and spectacle that kept the citizens of a dying republic in thrall. In this world, where for fully half the year the entire…
Giacomo Casanova, mostly remembered as an adventurous lover, wrote over a million words about his own life.
Here in Casanova’s Women, Summers turns the spotlight onto the women whom Casanova loved. I’ve read Casanova’s memoirs and have written a book about Casanova in Venice, but it was Summers’ chapters that made me reconsider perspective: How true is a story when it’s told from only one viewpoint?
Summers elevates the voices of these women, such as Casanova’s actress mother, the nuns who were his lovers, the adventurous sisters that he lost his virginity to, and the hometown girl who created one of London’s premier social spots. Their voices are invaluable in learning the fuller story.
Eighteenth-century Venetian adventurer Giacomo Casanova, history's most famous seducer, talked his way into the beds of more than 200 women. Charming, brilliant and devastatingly attractive, the compulsive womaniser claimed to like and understand his conquests. But he could also be ruthless, cruel, selfish and dishonest. Who were these women who established Casanova's extraordinary reputation? From the two sisters with whom he had his first sexual experience to the libidinous Venetian nun who defied God in order to sleep with him, from the wealthy widow he tricked out of a fortune to the love of his life, the glamorous and daring…
In prose that is engrossing and rich in color, culture, and voice, Dunant’s historical fiction novel incorporates stories of two of the women that I included in my own book.
The courtesan Fiammetta, loosely based on the life of Veronica Franco, and her healer La Draga, inspired by Elena Crusichi, pulled me into eighteenth-century Venice and its opportunities and dangers for enterprising women. Paired with reading Franco’s actual poems and letters, edited and translated by Ann Rosalind Jones and Margaret F. Rosenthal, I developed a deep admiration and compassion for Franco and Crusichi during Venice’s heyday.
Dunant has again written a page turner that I read more than once.
My lady, Fiammetta Bianchini, was plucking her eyebrows and biting color into her lips when the unthinkable happened and the Holy Roman Emperor’s army blew a hole in the wall of God’s eternal city, letting in a flood of half-starved, half-crazed troops bent on pillage and punishment.
Thus begins In the Company of the Courtesan, Sarah Dunant’s epic novel of life in Renaissance Italy. Escaping the sack of Rome in 1527, with their stomachs churning on the jewels they have swallowed, the courtesan Fiammetta and her dwarf companion, Bucino, head for Venice, the shimmering city born out of water to…
Sometimes reading eighteenth-century writing can be tedious due to the differing norms and expectations of writing. But Archangela Tarabotti’s essays burn the page.
Her anger is incandescent. She became a cloistered nun without a calling and lived her years trying to make a life of letters. Though she had a couple patrons—men—who brought her books and helped publish her works, she was at their mercy and was later nearly silenced by them. She rails against fathers, priests, and powerful nobles who limit women’s choices and voices. I have never forgotten her anger at injustice.
Sharp-witted and sharp-tongued, Arcangela Tarabotti (1604-52) yearned to be formally educated and enjoy an independent life in Venetian literary circles. But instead, at sixteen, her father forced her into a Benedictine convent. To protest her confinement, Tarabotti composed polemical works exposing the many injustices perpetrated against women of her day.
Paternal Tyranny, the first of these works, is a fiery but carefully argued manifesto against the oppression of women by the Venetian patriarchy. Denouncing key misogynist texts of the era, Tarabotti shows how despicable it was for Venice, a republic that prided itself on its political liberties, to deprive its…
A spy school for girls amidst Jane Austen’s high society.
Daughters of the Beau Monde who don’t fit London society’s strict mold are banished to Stranje House, where the headmistress trains these unusually gifted girls to enter the dangerous world of spies in the Napoleonic wars. #1 NYT bestselling author Meg Cabot calls this exciting historical series "completely original and totally engrossing."
A School for Unusual Girls is the first captivating installment in the Stranje House series for young adults by award-winning author Kathleen Baldwin. #1 New York Times bestselling author Meg Cabot calls this romantic Regency adventure "completely original and totally engrossing."
It's 1814. Napoleon is exiled on Elba. Europe is in shambles. Britain is at war on four fronts. And Stranje House, a School for Unusual Girls, has become one of Regency England's dark little secrets. The daughters of the beau monde who don't fit high society's constrictive mold are banished to Stranje House to be reformed into marriageable young…
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