Unliterary, Unpolished, Unromantic
Charles Nicholl: ‘The Merchant of Prato’, 8 February 2018
The Merchant of Prato: Daily Life in a Medieval Italian City
by Iris Origo.
Penguin, 400 pp., £10.99, May 2017,978 0 241 29392 8 Show More
by Iris Origo.
Penguin, 400 pp., £10.99, May 2017,
“... Lady Sybil was both possessive and unpredictable: she is summed up by Origo’s biographer, Caroline Moorehead, as ‘a woman with a will of iron and an all-consuming obsession with her own health’. In Aldous Huxley’s caustic satire of expats in Italy, Those Barren Leaves, she is caricatured as Mrs Aldwinkle, the rich Englishwoman who thinks of ... ”