From Page to Perfume: Sarah Dunant on Reanimating Isabella d'Este in 'The Marchesa'

Sarah Dunant is a novelist, broadcaster, and cultural critic whose work blurs the line between historical inquiry and literary imagination. Best known for her fiction set in Renaissance Italy, she gives voice to women whose lives have been obscured by time, deftly merging narrative and historicism. Rendering the past not as backdrop but as pulse, Dunant allows history to unfold with the texture of lived experience. Her acclaimed novels, The Birth of Venus, In the Company of the Courtesan, and Sacred Hearts, have been translated into over thirty languages.

A long-time contributor to BBC Radio 4 and a thoughtful commentator on the intersections of gender, art, and power, Dunant returns with The Marchesa, a novel centred on Isabella d’Este. The Marchesa offers a vivid reimagining of Isabella d’Este: art collector, political strategist, fashion icon, and one of the most influential women of the Italian Renaissance. Her court is long vanished, her treasures scattered, but thousands of preserved letters remain, housed in the deconsecrated church that now holds Mantua’s state archive.

From this paper trail, Sarah Dunant conjures Isabella’s voice, bold, curious, and unyielding, tracing her life from precocious daughter and reluctant bride to formidable consort and cultural force. Blending fiction with biography and art history, The Marchesa is both an intimate portrait and dialogue with Isabella, and a reflection on how we read the past through the lens of the present.

CJLPA: In your talk, ‘Being lost and being afraid is a part of writing’, you mentioned that before you began writing Sacred Hearts, you knew it would open in a cloistered convent, with the silence broken by the scream of a young girl. That striking image stayed with you throughout the research process.

In The Marchesa, you begin with a very different kind of sensory register: scent. ‘I have always had the most sensitive nose’ is the novel’s opening line, a sharp contrast to the auditory jolt of Sacred Hearts.

Why did you choose to open with Isabella’s sense of smell – her perception of bodies, decay, and perfume – evoking a rich fusion of Renaissance luxury and the physical erosion of her afterlife? Was this sensory focus present throughout your research process? 

Sarah Dunant: It’s a good question, actually. The gleam of the idea for this novel came when I was in the archives in Mantua, and I went behind the door and had a look at where the archives are stored. It’s an extraordinary building because it’s in a deconsecrated church and an old Jesuit convent. There’s a huge amount of history just pulsing out at you from these disintegrating folders. It struck me, because I already knew then how many letters Isabella had written and how many were written to her, that in some sense Isabella herself was in the archive. She was in the letters. She saturated the ink of them. 

That was when I, in this rather antiseptic reading room, opened one of those boxes. I imagined that she was actually present in the letter, and I had a rather romantic image, before I went to the archive, that she would probably hover somewhere above and look down at whichever scholar was studying her.

Now, when I finally sat in the reading room, it was a bit municipal and boring and bare, so it was harder to hold that image. But I did feel that there was also a smell in the archive – and it’s the smell of decay. It struck me that I knew Isabella had had a relationship with scent. I knew that, and I knew many of the women at that time did, because of the relationship of bodies, decay, illness and dirt in the period.

I’ve always felt that within historical novels, or within history, we spend a lot of time with the words. We spend a lot of time with the artefacts. We don’t spend a lot of time with the senses. So I thought it would be very nice to begin with a scent.

That idea began to coalesce the more research I did, and the more I understood syphilis, and what it meant to live with someone who had it, as her husband did. That understanding started to shift how I thought about scent: how it might carry disease, how perfume was used to ward off the plague or mask unpleasant smells.

So I suppose what I’m saying is that the single image of her in the archive became a kind of magnet. As my research went on, other ideas gathered around it – scent, illness, the sense of smell. And as you’ll know from later in the book, there’s a passage where I say the problem with history is that it’s all words, you can’t enter the senses. She tries to take the scholar back into the court: to smell the food, hear the sounds. And I felt that was vital. It’s one of the ways you can make the past come alive.

And it isn’t until you remind me, of course, that Sacred Hearts began with a scream, another version of the senses, something hitting you from history, that I realise this has always been something the historian in me has been drawn to. Historians are now working on things like soundscapes for particular periods. And so we try to project people back into the past atmospherically and sensuously, as well as through the rather dry, desiccated notion of the word on the page.

CJLPA: The nature of your book involves the interweaving of narrative and history, and you include italicised fragments from Isabella’s real-life letters, which are often verbatim. You then expand on them into a narrative with emotional depth. Rather than inventing a character entirely, it seems you’re really building on what the text gives you, adding interiority while staying grounded in the history and context. How did you approach that layering process, and what guided you in developing a voice and perspective around these documents?

SD: Actually, I think that Isabella is the greatest gift a writer could possibly have, because although she is, in many cases, a piece of work, she’s a manipulator—she’s got charm and she’s also politically savvy. She uses letters as part of her diplomatic armoury, both to get what she wants in art and to control political situations when she’s having to rule the state. You start to see how letters contained absolutely everything during that period.

While we now see letters as something intimate, in that period they served as a kind of armoury, especially for a woman with status and influence. For someone like Isabella, letters were tools for everything from managing family relationships to controlling foreign policy or acquiring a work of art. If you read enough of her words, you begin to see her clearly, you watch the chameleon-like shifts in her tone depending on whom she’s addressing. She’s imperious when crossed: when the artist Bellini in Venice refuses to deliver a painting, she takes him to court to reclaim her money. That’s one kind of Isabella.

Then there’s the charming Isabella, like when it’s clear they backed the wrong horse in one of the Italian wars, and she has to be as friendly to France as she was to Spain. You watch her craft letters full of flattery, things like ‘Oh, we’re all wearing the fleur-de-lis here because it’s so wonderful that you won’. Through these letters, you see the many facets of her personality and begin to appreciate both her intelligence and her guile. This also highlights how women wielded power at the time: they couldn’t show their hand openly. The art market was dominated by men, and the diplomatic world, where most decisions were made, was run almost entirely by men.

How did women make their mark without seeming too pushy? You watch Isabella use letter writing like a set of split personalities. Once I found her voice, I saw she had self-awareness, she knew when to be charming. There’s a moment in the book when her husband is in prison, and she must write a pleading letter to the Queen of France, asking her to intercede. I imagined her crafting that very flowery letter: ‘Oh, I die a thousand times when I think of my poor husband’. But I don’t think she really dies a thousand times, I think she chose exactly how many times to say it to sound right to the Queen. And that gave me a richness of personality. It’s also a historical observation because it is about how women coped during this period of time.

You could see the book as political, a feminist effort to reclaim history periods usually dominated by men. If you ask people to name figures from the Italian Renaissance, few will name a woman. I wanted to write a political book as a historian that’s also a gripping read, so you keep turning pages to find out what happens. Having worked for the BBC, I recall its founder Lord Reith’s idea that good broadcasting should educate, inform, and entertain. Over time, education has come to seem elitist or threatening in culture. So I invert that: if you entertain, you can inform, and maybe even educate, slipping education in under the guise of entertainment.

CJLPA: Going on from this, Isabella is so wonderfully sharp, reflective, but also can be envious, jealous, and performative. In this moment for example, where you write ‘My hand reveals a tremor, deliberate, of course, as I write the words’. Here she’s calculated, and she seems self-conscious of her effect on history. 

Did you find moments in her real letters where that kind of theatrical self-awareness emerged? Was there a particular piece of correspondence that revealed the contrast between the woman and the icon, between the strategist and the self-doubting daughter?

SD: What I will say is that sometimes the letters challenge us across time. One in particular stands out: after giving birth to a second daughter, she writes a short, painful letter to her husband saying, ‘the chill that has come over me because I have given birth to another daughter’. For the modern reader, it can be jarring. Too often, we look to the past, expecting people to wear prettier dresses and feel exactly as we do. But if you do the real work of a historian, you begin to understand that their thoughts grew from a different cultural soil. This letter is a striking example. At the time, marriages often faltered if a woman couldn’t produce a male heir.

Isabella needs to produce a boy, and six years into her marriage, she hasn’t. And within that letter, I think something else is being revealed about her. The novelist in me thought: I don’t think this woman enjoys sex, actually. I think what she enjoys is the work she’s doing as a collector of art. She takes pleasure in being smart, confident, and politically capable. She doesn’t strike me as one of those simpering women who coasted by on their looks and male attention.

CJLPA: Do you think this was an area where her sister Beatrice thrived in a way Isabella didn’t?

SD: Yes, I think so. And in that case, I wonder if it all felt quite daunting for her, the idea that, as she tells the scholar, ‘I know it looks ridiculous for you to read this word “chill”, but you don’t know what it was like to be me’. In that moment, she had failed, again, to deliver a male heir. And that meant they had to keep trying until she did produce those three sons. We don’t often think about that now. We rarely consider that most women at the time would go on to have seven, eight, even nine children, that reality feels so distant from contemporary female experience. But it’s worth remembering: your gender was, in many ways, writing your history for you. And if you wanted to push back against that, you had to be clever, strategic. You had to know when to be sharp, when to be sweet. You had to learn how to survive it.

She’s a gorgeous character for both the novelist and the historian to get their teeth into. Because for the novelist, you can make her life narratively exciting. And for the historian, you can suggest that there are things she’s going to do that you may not necessarily like, coming from your own moment in history. But it seems to me that the imaginative journey of history is to take you back into the past and ask you to soak yourself in difference. And she is a perfect character to do that with, because sometimes she feels very modern. And then at other points, she feels absolutely grown from her own moment, in ways that are quite challenging to us.

CJLPA: To touch back on your previous point about Isabella and her sexual relations. There are recurring moments where Isabella complies dutifully with her husband Francesco II Gonzaga’s sexual advances but registers disgust, such as when ‘he pushes his tongue between my lips […] I get a smell off him […] breath or saliva? […] I feel bile rising in my throat’. This physical revulsion is echoed in her memory of the unsettling, pseudo-sexual relationship between Beatrice and her grandfather, and again later, when Francesco, on his deathbed, acknowledges that Isabella never found pleasure in the bedchamber. How do you see sex and sexual performance functioning in Isabella’s life, and more broadly, in the lives of women of that period?

SD: Well, it’s an interesting one, isn’t it? Because I have to be aware of myself, that I’m also leading a kind of schizophrenic life. There’s both the novelist and the historian in me. And interestingly enough, that’s exactly what I’m talking about in one of my Radio 4 talks: the historian in me cannot prove how Isabella feels about sex, because there’s no evidence of it. But the novelist can ask questions based on the material that’s being uncovered, and that might lead you to feel a certain way.

There’s an extraordinary letter she writes after all the marriage ceremonies have ended and everyone has left. She writes to her sister: ‘My lord could not be nicer to me, but, oh God, I miss you’. And it’s absolutely clear, yes, she’s young, yes, she’s homesick, but you feel this is a young girl who’s been through some kind of shock. She’s 16, and she’s been in the marriage bed with someone far more experienced than she is, because that’s how it worked in that period.

When we write historical fiction, there’s always a temptation to include sex, it’s part of the romantic cliché, especially with female characters. But we’re doing that from the perspective of decades of openness, of sex being sold back to us, discussed, deconstructed. In reality, many women in the past may not have liked sex or had the chance to explore it. They couldn’t reflect on it the way we can now, the strange contradictions, the mismatches between love and desire. So I wanted to challenge myself: can I write a good historical novel that doesn’t centre sex? Because often, in novels or period dramas, it’s conflict, sex, torture, the usual hooks. But I was more interested in being honest to the period, imagining a woman whose energy isn’t in the bedroom but in power, collecting, and patronage. That felt truer, and just as compelling.

CJLPA: You’ve said that you couldn’t have written these books 25 years ago because the research simply wasn’t there, and that it’s largely thanks to female historians asking new questions that women like Isabella have become more visible. There’s a moment in the novel where Isabella reflects on this shift herself: ‘Slowly, archives, throughout history founded by men for men, were being invaded by women […] my stubbornness, even my bad behaviour, were now to be celebrated’. 

It’s a powerful merging of past and present. How do you see this historical reclamation continuing to evolve, both within scholarship and fiction? And what role do you think novelists can play in pushing it forward?

SD: Well, what I could say is that when I studied history at Cambridge, a long time ago, I don’t think I wrote a woman’s name in an essay, possibly a royal name, but that’s it. The history of women was still something we hadn’t really thought about at all. And because my own journey coincides, if you like, with the arrival of feminism, I then watched as women, and some men too, started to ask questions of the past that we hadn’t asked before.

I think if I have an image of history now, it’s history as a kind of pointillist painting. The past is made up of dots. The artist puts a lot of dots on the canvas, and gradually, if you stand back, you get the form and structure of the painting through these dots. Well, what the last 30 or 40 years has done is add hundreds of thousands of dots, dots that are about the other gender in the world, which is women.

Take the Renaissance. In 1976, the historian Joan Scott wrote her article ‘Did Women Have a Renaissance?’ That’s how little we knew about women in the Renaissance at that time. Partly, of course, because the Renaissance becomes very fashionable again at the end of the nineteenth century, when history starts to be ‘invented’ by people like Jacob Burckhardt, and they’re not interested in the women. And partly because the only man who writes art history is Giorgio Vasari, and there’s maybe one woman in Vasari’s Lives of the Artists. There’s an orthodoxy up until the 1970s: this is what the past was.

So we have to rewrite the past, and that’s what I think history has done. What’s been fantastic about feminism is that it hasn’t just rewritten the present, it’s rewritten the past.

Novelists have taken two main routes when writing about women in the past. One was famous women, and the other was women who were treated badly. So you had this kind of binary: famous but hidden, or victims.

What’s fascinating about a character like Isabella is that she’s a flawed, fantastically interesting woman. I don’t have to make her a victim; she was nobody’s victim. I don’t have to make her likable. I don’t have to make her sexually attractive. She can stand on her own two feet and be who she was in history: a complex, powerful human being. That, I think, is the last part of feminism’s journey, that we don’t have to excuse these women, or feel sorry for them, or champion them. They’re just included as part of this rich painting, which, when we stand back, now looks different. And I think that’s so important.

It feels to me like that should be the role of historians: to show that history is more complex than we thought, and it’s always more complex than our own moral judgments about a particular moment in time. Our job is to leave our own morality behind and go back and immerse ourselves. And that’s what makes Isabella such a wonderful subject, because you are immersed, because she’s talking to you. And in the end, I can’t tell when I’m talking or she’s talking, because the two merge.

I didn’t always like her though, I thought sometimes, ‘God, I’m really glad I wasn’t one of your ladies-in-waiting’. But I admire her, because she took no prisoners. 

CJLPA: You’ve spoken about her determination as a collector and how she had to fight to be taken seriously in a male-dominated art market. But her influence extended beyond collecting, into politics, fashion, taste, and the arts across Europe. Her studiolo is often a focal point for historians. How do you see her use of aesthetics and patronage as part of her self-fashioning and assertion of power?

SD: She’s a little bit like a very, very early Virginia Woolf with A Room of One’s Own. It’s interesting because we know about places like Urbino and Gubbio, where the Duke of Urbino had small rooms for men to consider the classics, appreciate art, and define themselves as cultural beings. Women didn’t have that space.

Right from the start, Isabella goes for it. She had some training in this, born at the right moment, in the 1470s in Ferrara. The main Renaissance focus is usually Florence, Venice, Milan, and Naples, but places like Ferrara and Mantua had great artists and their own early Renaissance schools.

Isabella grew up in a city saturated with art and with parents who greatly appreciated art. On her mother’s wall was a Rogier van der Weyden Deposition, for example. Isabella understood art from a young age and was well educated. She was perfectly positioned to build her own collection with clear taste.

This was a time when all the big names were sought after. And I think the wonderful thing about that studiolo is that right from the start, it has marked out on its walls places where the art is going to go. So in the case of her first studio, we know what her view was, looking out over the lakes. We know where the paintings would have gone. When commissioning works, she would specify details like light direction and subject. She was almost a control freak.

Some artists, Bellini in particular, resisted, wanting more freedom. But she’s also lucky because she inherits one of the great mid to late fifteenth-century painters, which is Andrea Mantegna. Now, he’s old by the time he comes to her. He’s not a particularly loving character. He clearly takes offence of being bossed around by a 17 year old girl. They clashed, but he still delivered art to her and this gave her confidence to seek other artists, including Leonardo da Vinci.

Her hunger for art, her confidence, and upbringing surrounded by art meant she wasn’t nervous about her own taste, vital for a collector. But as a woman, this was tricky because it was more about what she wanted than charm. The dilemma is how much she charms versus how much she orders to get what she wants.

What I really think about Isabella is that she was very lucky. She was a girl child and was loved by her father, it was very unusual for her to receive that sort of education. It was a moment when women were beginning to be educated in humanist culture, but it wasn’t intended that they would then use it in the way she did. Because she was smart, the firstborn, and adored, she exuded a kind of confidence from a very early age and clearly quite enjoyed showing off. That’s another reason why she is both adorable and deplorable at the same time.

CJLPA: Are there any pieces in her collection that you were particularly fond of or that stuck out to you?

SD: The piece I love, because the story really shows her bad behaviour, is the little Michelangelo statue, which no longer exists. It’s an amazing story. We know that when Michelangelo was a student in the Medici sculpture workshop in Florence, he copied a trope from Greek and Roman mythology: Cupid lying on a bed of stone, sculpted in marble or bronze. It showed the sculptor’s incredible talent to be able to do this with soft, childish flesh. 

Michelangelo made one, and then he and a dealer dirtied it up, sent it to Rome, buried it in the ground, and ‘rediscovered’ it before selling it to a cardinal – this was before Michelangelo had become famous. When the cardinal found out it was a fake, he sold it on. But by the time Isabella goes after it, it’s already a famous fake, because Michelangelo’s name is now well known.

She gets it by going behind the backs of her in-laws, whose state has been invaded by Cesare Borgia. They’re actually staying with her at the time, seeking refuge. And she’s clearly always coveted this piece from the Duke of Urbino’s collection. So she writes to her brother, who’s a cardinal, asking if he can intercede with the Pope, who is Cesare’s father, to get her that little statue. And she does get it.

Of course, it’s bad behaviour, right? But as I have made her say, and what she more or less says in the letters, is that that’s what you do when you’re a collector. And if men behaved like this, it would be seen as them really knowing what they wanted and getting it – strategic intelligence. So don’t blame me. And I love that about her. I know her brother-in-law was very annoyed about it. I know he made it clear when he got back to his state that he’d like things back that had been taken. She writes this incredibly awful letter going, ‘Oh, but I spoke to your wife. She said if she knew that I’d liked it, she would have given it to me. So it’s really just between us families, isn’t it?’

She spins this tale and you think, ‘how could you say this?’ But of course, you want the Cupid, you get the Cupid, and you keep the Cupid. So at the same time as you’re enormously impressed, you’re quite shocked. 

CJLPA: Returning to another shocking moment, the syphilis outbreak had a significant impact on Isabella and her relationship with Francesco. He was surprisingly brash about the illness, writing in 1508 to his agent at the court of Louis XII of France: ‘Please tell the king that my illness is probably caused by love!’ – to explain why he may not be able to fight in battle. At the time, it seems the illness was almost celebrated like a battle wound.

Later, Isabella received a letter stating: ‘His Lordship showed me how the marks of his affliction have healed […] he would like to consummate marriage with you again […] a fresh young girl’. In retrospect, the letter reads as deeply unsettling, especially when viewed through a modern lens, with the knowledge we now have about the long-term ramifications of syphilis.

What impact did Francesco’s contraction of syphilis have on Isabella, both personally and publicly? And is there any evidence that they ceased physical relations after his diagnosis?

SD: It’s a question that I ask myself. She must have known. And yet, there is nothing directly in the letters. Now, obviously, I haven’t read every letter, but I know the scholars who’ve done all the work on her, and I went to them and said, ‘Have you discovered anything about her talking about her husband’s syphilis?’ She knows syphilis exists. It’s in the other letters. Everybody knows that, it was an open secret. But there is nothing.

The other thing is, she doesn’t have any more children after the age of 34. In some shape or form, she’s managing to avoid the marriage bed. At this point the disease is galloping. It’s shifting and changing and mutating.

So I needed to ask myself that question, how will I find out how she knew? And it was by reading Francesco’s letters, that I discovered the comment you mentioned to the French king. And then I found that letter about Francesco’s ‘marks of affliction’. 

I love that letter because we do know the couple had a row at that time. We know that she writes back to him furiously. She never mentions the invitation. She never mentions that letter. But she basically says, ‘Don’t give me a hard time. You have nothing to condemn me for’. Now, normally, she’s sweet as pie in the letters when she writes to him. Whatever she’s personally feeling, it’s ‘Oh, I miss you, I love you’. She plays along with the narrative of the good wife. But in that one, she really goes for him. That, if you like, is the moment when the novelist and the historian go hand in hand again. And I, to this day, will defend the fact that I’m sure she knew about the syphilis, and I’m sure it was therefore deliberate that she doesn’t sleep with him.

By 1509, Francesco had likely been suffering from syphilis for several years, though this wouldn’t have been obvious, since initially the symptoms disappeared, giving the illusion of a cure. The disease was still new and poorly understood; it would return in cycles, and a man could remain sexually contagious for three or four years even without visible symptoms. There is no documentation of how noblewomen responded, it’s almost as if they weren’t supposed to know.

There’s a great quote by Thomas Aquinas, which is: ‘prostitution is the sewer on the great palace’. So everybody needs it, right? Or men need it. And it’s the notion, sexual politics at this period of time, is about pure women and virile men. And so when I was writing about Lucrezia Borgia, she’s immediately slandered for doing things that men would do all the time, and would be perceived to be extraordinary and manly and wonderful as a result of it. So the double standard in sexual behaviour is really powerful.

CJLPA: Giulio Romano created the Room of the Giants at the Palazzo Te in Mantua, completing it between 1532 and 1535. The fresco portrays the dramatic story of the giants' rebellion against the gods, drawn from Greek and Roman mythology, specifically Ovid's Metamorphoses. The Room of the Giants was commissioned not by Isabella d'Este, but by her son, Federico II Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua.  You’ve mentioned in previous interviews that whilst Isabella might have resisted the grotesque elements of the Room of the Giants,  she was likely captivated by the sheer imagination behind it. 

How do you think Isabella’s personal tastes and ambitions influenced her collaboration with Giulio Romano, and what does that reveal about her as a patron and a woman navigating artistic power?

SD: The thing about Isabella is that she was quite traditional in her views on art, particularly when it came to what she felt was morally or aesthetically right. And art was taking a real turn in the 1520s. We were moving away from the height of the Renaissance. Partly, that shift was due to the Sack of Rome, but also because the Renaissance itself was leaving Rome behind. This marked the beginning of the Mannerist period: artists had mastered human anatomy and perspective, and the style began to evolve, becoming more grotesque, more extravagant.

Before long, the Counter-Reformation would sweep in and strip art of its sensuality, responding to anxieties about the Reformation. Isabella wouldn’t have been particularly fond of the more fleshy, erotic elements emerging at that time. Take Giulio Romano, for example, an extraordinarily talented painter who arrived in Rome and created what we now recognise as the first true Mannerist palace. He experimented with architecture in ways that Michelangelo would later echo, but Giulio did it first. He was also a master of erotic art. Even today, at the Palazzo Te, you’ll see Priapic gods, willing female figures, Apollo driving a chariot entirely nude in the lunette above. It’s extravagant, overtly sensual, likely not to Isabella’s taste. She had a certain prudishness.

Still, I think she appreciated greatness when she saw it. I imagine Isabella sitting in those rooms, recognising how extraordinary it was. I led a tour to Mantua and Ferrara in the autumn, and even today, when people walk into the Room of the Giants, they are stunned. They’ve never seen anything like it. As one scholar put it, it’s like ‘grotesque Disney’. Completely immersive. Romano reshaped the room itself, it no longer feels like a room, but a cave. The original floor was made of pebbles that rose to meet the walls. You weren’t just looking at art; you were in it. More like stepping onto a film set than viewing a painting.

CJLPA: As we reach the end of The Marchesa, the ending folds in on itself, the scholar becomes the author, the archive becomes the novel. It’s a quietly profound moment about authorship, legacy, and the act of writing history. What does that cyclical structure mean to you? Is it a comment on how we carry the past forward, or how women, across time, help write and rediscover one another into being?

SD: I didn’t know how The Marchesa would end when I began writing. I knew Isabella’s personality would take the lead, the more I learned about her, the more her voice asserted itself. I always knew I wanted her to be in a kind of silent conversation with the scholar. And looking back, I think the book is partly about how one writes historical fiction, if one is serious about the history.

I’ve now written six of these novels and spent 25 years in the Renaissance, which ironically wasn’t a period I studied when I trained as a historian. So I came to it as an outsider, just as all this rich research was unfolding. My approach is always split: the historian in me is constantly checking facts, making sure I’ve got the context right. The novelist, though, is waiting for that moment when I can turn knowledge into narrative, when I feel grounded enough in the truth to imagine beyond it.

That shift is almost osmotic. I sit with the research for so long that eventually I stop analysing it and start inhabiting it. I cease to be the historian and become the novelist. So that moment at the end, when Isabella stops being the historical figure and becomes a character in a novel, is, in a way, what I believe historical fiction should do. And perhaps that’s why I don’t know if I’ll write another one. It feels like I’ve followed that thread to its end.

It was fascinating being in the company of someone so strong, so smart, so flawed, who could only do what she did by being absolutely determined. You have to show her behaving badly and still forgive her. That’s why I liked the device of her talking to the future, and the future talking back through the scholar. The scholar’s journey is about saying: I leave my present behind and enter your past.

And I have to say, Lily-Rose, it’s really important to me that you have seen so much in it, because I’m now an older white woman, I’m trying to have a conversation about the present in the past. And I would like to have that conversation with people exactly at your moment. Because there are still things to be talked about. The battles haven’t all been won. We still need spaces where these intergenerational dialogues can happen. So the fact that you got so much from The Marchesa, and enjoyed it – well, that’s everything.

Bio: 

Lily-Rose is a Cambridge University graduate, the External Arts Officer at CJLPA, and Managing Editor at The COLD Magazine. Currently working at DMG Media, she will soon begin a Magazine Journalism MA at City, St George, and she is the recipient of the Stationers’ Award. As a journalist and editor, she explores art and culture through film, theatre, literature, fashion, and visual art, with a focus on social issues, cultural context, and representation.