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Alessandra’s greatest desire is to be an artist, but as a woman she will never have the means or opportunity to fulfil her ambitions. In The Birth of Venus (Random House/Virago 2004), Sarah Dunant tells the tale of Alessandra Cecchi, the daughter of a rich merchant in fifteenth-century Florence, who is everything a woman should not be, strong-willed, intelligent, talented and ugly. Spoiler alerts: following are indepth studies of these novels. In her two most recent works, historical novels set in Renaissance Italy, Ms Dunant has ventured to get inside the Italian psyche. However, this is an outsider’s view of Italy. Ms Dunant’s first venture into writing about Italy was a contemporary novel, Mapping the Edge, about an English woman’s fractured adventures on an emotional trip to Florence. However, as an Italian woman myself, I know how Italians relate to the foreigners in their midst and they are not as easily understood as a British “Italophile” might believe. Sarah Dunant is an English writer who now divides her time between London and Florence (half her luck!) I daresay she feels that, having studied Italian history and lived amongst Italians, she knows Italian culture. I sometimes wonder if it is safe for a novelist to attempt to portray cultures other than her own. Can an English author really understand the Italians?
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