Queen Bee of Tuscany
The Redoubtable Janet Ross
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
"Quite simply one of the best books of the year." —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
Ben Downing's Queen Bee of Tuscany brings an extraordinary Victorian back to life. Born into a distinguished intellectual family and raised among luminaries such as Dickens and Thackeray, Janet Ross married at eighteen and went to live in Egypt. There, for the next six years, she wrote for the London Times, hobnobbed with the developer of the Suez Canal, and humiliated pashas in horse races. In 1867 she moved to Florence, Italy where she spent the remaining sixty years of her life writing a series of books and hosting a colorful miscellany of friends and neighbors, from Mark Twain to Bernard Berenson, at Poggio Gherardo, her house in the hills above the city. Eventually she became the acknowledged doyenne of the Anglo-Florentine colony, as it was known. Yet she was also immersed in the rural life of Tuscany: An avid agriculturalist, she closely supervised the farms on her estate and the sharecroppers who worked them, often pitching in on grape and olive harvests.
Spirited, erudite, and supremely well-connected, Ross was one of the most dynamic women of her day. Her life offers a fascinating window on fascinating times, from the Risorgimento to the rise of fascism.
Encompassing all this rich history, Queen Bee of Tuscany is a panoramic portrait of an age, a family, and our evolving love affair with Tuscany.
A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2013
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Star-studded with dignitaries, nobles, literati, and other famous folk of the Victorian age, poet Downing's (The Calligraphy Shop) nonfiction debut tells the fascinating larger-than-life story of Janet Ross. Born and raised amongst the intellectual set in England, Ross left as soon as she was able to live first in Egypt, and then in Florence, where she joined an already settled colony of migr s and set about bucking every convention of her time. Henry James described her as "an odd mixture of the British female and the dangerous woman a Bohemian with rules and accounts." An avid horsewoman with few maternal instincts, Ross freely spoke her mind, wrote several books, managed her own estate, and even made and marketed her own vermouth. She seemed to know or be connected to everyone at one of her birthday parties, she hosted William Makepeace Thackeray, feminist Caroline Norton, playwright Tom Taylor, and Whig statesmen Lord Lansdowne. And that was her fifth birthday she was the sole author of the guest list. Downing's breathless coverage of Ross and her "Anglo-Tuscan" coterie can be a bit overwhelming name-dropping at times overshadows narrative but those enamored with the history, society, and culture of Victorian England and the expatriate community will relish this engrossing biography.