Palmerino
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $14.99
-
- $14.99
Publisher Description
“A writer at the height of her powers.” ―Oprah.com
Is not empathy that consciousness leading us, unwitting, into the realm of spirits, avatars, even demons? Are not the dead still trying to reach the living?
Welcome to Palmerino, the British enclave in rural Italy where Violet Paget, known to the world by her pen name and male persona, Vernon Lee, held court. In imagining the real life of this brilliant, lesbian polymath known for her chilling supernatural stories, Pritchard creates a multilayered tale in which the dead writer inhabits the heart and mind of her lonely, modern-day biographer.
Positing the art of biography as an act of resurrection and possession, this novel brings to life a vividly detailed, subtly erotic tale about secret loves and the fascinating artists and intellectuals—Oscar Wilde, John Singer Sargent, Henry James, Robert Browning, Bernard Berenson—who challenged and inspired each other during an age of repression.
Melissa Pritchard is the author of the novel Palmerino, the short story collection The Odditorium, and the essay collection A Solemn Pleasure: To Imagine, Witness, and Write, among other books. Emeritus Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Arizona State University, she now lives in Columbus, Georgia.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Violet Paget, who wrote under the name Vernon Lee, is now largely forgotten, but in the Victorian era, she was a well-known intellectual, writer, and eccentric (she wore men's clothes and was likely a lesbian) who palled around with the likes of Henry James and John Singer Sargent. Palmerino, Paget's house outside Florence, is the site of Pritchard's (The Odditorium) novel and the place where Sylvia, a writer of historical fiction whose last books did poorly and whose husband has just left her, has come to write about Paget. Increasingly engrossed in her subject she is even, it comes to seem, haunted and possessed by her Sylvia tries to imagine the intimate details of the relationships between Paget and the women she loved. The book toggles between the past and the present, between Sylvia's more biographical efforts and her more novelistic ones and her waning connection to present-day life. Pritchard focuses on the complexities of love and the limits and possibilities of empathetic imagination, but while the Italian setting is deftly handled, the extra layers of story, notwithstanding the supernatural touches, don't add enough, and the book never achieves the synthesis it needs to carry weight as a novel rather than as a sympathetic pr cis of Paget's life.
