Disobedient

By Elizabeth Fremantle,

Book cover of Disobedient

Book description

'This is the ring that you gave me, and these are your promises.'

Rome 1611. A jewel-bright place of change, with sumptuous new palaces and lavish wealth on constant display. A city where women are seen but not heard.

Artemisia Gentileschi dreams of becoming a great artist. Motherless, she grows…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked Disobedient as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

In seventeenth-century Rome, a talented young woman artist, Artemesia Gentileschi, is put on trial for accusing her painting instructor of rapeUnwilling to bow to convention, Artemesia pours her rage into her art, inventing an aesthetic against the voyeurism and female submissiveness found in traditional artistic representations of women.

Fremantle heightens the drama and contemporary relevance of Artemisia’s life and art by telling her story in the present tense. Drawing subtle connections between women’s struggles for autonomy and dignity in the past and those in the present, this page-turner of a novel is a searing, nuanced portrait of a…

Artemisia Gentileschi was a talented artist, growing up motherless in a family of male artists, in 17th-century Rome, where a woman’s honor was her most valuable possession.

An impulsive action by the woman hired to be her chaperone sets in motion a horrifying and brutal chain of events. The pace of the story-telling, the colorful scene-setting, and the insights into Artemisia’s thoughts and feelings are picture-perfect. This is phenomenal writing by an author who in my opinion is better than Hilary Mantel.

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