The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice (Women in Culture and Society Series) (edit title)

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Didn’t Like It Rated 2 stars “After falling in love with the lush and evocative movie based on this woman's life ("Dangerous Beauty"), I went out to read what I could about her. Unfortunately, this is all I could find aside from a book of letters. This appears to be the author's doctoral dissertation - full...” see full review » see other reviews »

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  • Rated 0 stars

  “The text is thick. I read passages then have to put it down. It's not bad writing, but it's not a book that I curl up with.”

  Kelly D wrote this review Friday, September 18 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No

  
  
  • Rated 0 stars

  “This book deserves a better title. (This one makes it sound like a trashy soft-porn romance). Though slow-moving, and most likely a dissertation edited for public consumption, is the historical account of a courtesan living and writing in a culture and time which had stacked all odds against her. ”

  Elaine S wrote this review Monday, June 1 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No

  
  
  • Rated 2 stars

  “After falling in love with the lush and evocative movie based on this woman's life ("Dangerous Beauty"), I went out to read what I could about her.
  
  Unfortunately, this is all I could find aside from a book of letters.
  
  This appears to be the author's doctoral dissertation - full of footnotes and references and dry as a bone. To give the author credit though, it is hard to write a biography on someone where all one knows about the subject is the period and her writings - most of which were poems - and a few verses someone else wrote about her in criticism. None of her patrons or her lovers wrote about her, there were no newspapers at the time and few records so Franco simply appears and then disappears from history. Even the date of her death is in question, because after a financial disaster, the woman stops writing or her writings are no longer published/found, and so she simply drops out of sight. The author, writing a serious piece doesn't speculate on hair, clothing or what her life *might* have been like, but instead sticks to the facts which become repetitive due to their scarcity.
  
  A shame. Veronica deserved much more.”

  Medea Dirae wrote this review Saturday, August 9 2008. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No