Palmerino

British intellectual and writer Vernon Lee, born Violet Paget (1856–1935), spent much of her life at the Villa Il Palmerino in Tuscany, where she dressed as a man, carried on a long-term love affair with another woman, and engaged in literary, philosophical, and artistic debates with the greatest minds of her time. Pritchard's novel alternates between a contemporary story about Sylvia, a 60-year-old British novelist recently dumped by her husband for his male lover, who travels alone to Villa Il Palmerino to conduct research for a historical novel about Vernon Lee, and scenes from the life of Lee herself. The most interesting portions of the book imagine the writer's real-life encounters with other historical figures, such as American art historian and aesthete Bernard Berenson, with whom she clashed. The transitions between the time periods are plodding, especially when Sylvia is literally haunted by the earlier writer.