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…
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 rape. Unwilling 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…
From Kathleen's list on women forgotten, misunderstood, or hidden from history.
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.
From Gill's list on historical novels based on real people.
If you love Disobedient...
Cities of Women
Cities of Women is a dual timeline novel that interweaves the contemporary story of Verity Frazier, a disillusioned professor lacking passion and love in her life, with the tale of a medieval woman, who transforms herself into the artist, Anastasia, an unidentified illuminator of the manuscripts of the historical Christine…
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