A richly imagined, sensuous tale of a British writer holding court in Italy, flouting Victorian mores via her writing and her sexuality.
— O, The Oprah Magazine
Palmerino
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.
O, The Oprah Magazine “Title to Pick Up Now”
Chicago Tribune/Printers Row Journal featured excerpt
GayRVA.com “Top 5 Summer Read”
Society Nineteen “Fiction Favorite”
Publishers Weekly “Big Indie Book,” Book Expo America “Galley to Grab,” and Book Expo America “Big Book of the Show”
Library Journal Book Expo America Editor’s Pick
American Library Association “Over the Rainbow List” selection
Paperback
- ISBN
- 9781934137680
Ebook
- ISBN
- 9781934137697
Melissa Pritchard talks about the narrative triptych structure of Palmerino with Connotation Press; explains why libraries have become her writing temples in Superstition Review; and shares stories about the sojourn in Italy that sparked the novel with ASU News.
Melissa Pritchard is the author of twelve books, including the novels Flight of the Wild Swan and Palmerino, the short story collection The Odditorium, and the essay collection A Solemn Pleasure: To Imagine, Witness, and Write. Among other honors, she has received the Flannery O’Connor Award, Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, and Carl Sandburg Literary Award as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Carson McCullers Center. Emeritus Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Arizona State University, she is the fiction editor for Image journal and lives in Columbus, Georgia.
visit author page »Praise for Palmerino
Fiction can reimagine flesh-and-blood folks to stunning effect . . . What a pleasure, then, to discover Melissa Pritchard’s Palmerino, which envisions the life of Vernon Lee, the pen name and male persona of Englishwoman Violet Paget. Opening with the contemporary story of Sylvia, who discovers Lee while working at Villa il Palmerino in the Italian countryside and becomes her biographer, this work is related in sun-on-raindrops prose that draws in readers.
Rarely has a novel based on real people reached such deftly crafted literary excellence as this historical work of fiction clearly documenting Melissa Pritchard as a writer equal to any of the people populating her superbly presented story. Palmerino is a complex and entertaining novel that is highly recommended for personal reading lists and community library literary fiction collections.
Dazzling in its descriptions, lush and lyrical in language, Palmerino is a jewel of a novel. It is a tale to be savored like a rich Italian pastry. Melissa Pritchard’s characters—eccentric, quirky, and brilliant—will live on in the heart and mind long after the last crumb is licked from the plate.
— Naomi Benaron, author of Running the Rift
At the heart of Palmerino lies beauty, grace, longing, love. Melissa Pritchard’s picturesque prose is fertile, sensuous, a voice of insight, truth. Unique and refreshing as ‘the great female soul that is Palmerino.’ Gorgeous and heartbreaking. This book is a sensual treasure.
— Kim Chinquee, author of Pretty
Palmerino finds Melissa Pritchard’s signature style in peak form. Pritchard is a writer of sensibility. Her unique gift is the ability to interweave the resonances of consciousness—memory, intelligence, emotion—with those of a historical time and a powerful sense of place, so that character emerges as a coherent, credible, internal voice uttering a sensual flow of language, both lush and precise.
— Stuart Dybek, author of The Coast of Chicago
This lovely, sexy novel provides a sumptuous glance into the secret lives of artists. At its center is Violet, a fierce woman who never met a rule she didn’t break. Melissa Pritchard’s voice is completely her own and her characters are as unique, wild and magical as she is.
— Tayari Jones, author of Silver Sparrow
Bounding between Italy today and of a century ago, a breathtaking gallop through intellectualism, feminism, sexuality, cultural history, honeysuckle, focaccia, plums, language, landscape, love, the supernatural, metafiction, mortality and resurrection, with Pritchard always firmly at the reins.
— Anne Korkeakivi, author of An Unexpected Guest
A taut and elegant imagining of Vernon Lee’s life that sparkles with Einfühlung for the writer, for Italy and for the love—wild, unconsummated, shattered—that lies at the heart of the best creative work. Weaving fact and fiction, past and present, Palmerino becomes its own beautiful mirror, a work that ‘slips free of the self’ to reveal the mysterious other. Sublime and moving, its gorgeous prose haunts the reader long after the last page.
— Ana Menéndez, author of Adios, Happy Homeland!
Seduction is at the lush heart of Palmerino. The Florentine retreat seduces us just as surely as it seduces the lonely and abandoned Sylvia, an historical novelist who in turn is seduced by the spirit of the brilliant Violet Paget, who lived there a century earlier. Writing as Vernon Lee, Violet’s own seduction is one of the most quietly erotic scenes ever written.
— Pamela Painter, author of Wouldn’t You Like to Know
In her subtle yet breathtaking new novel, Palmerino, Melissa Pritchard seduces us once again with her characteristically sensual and deeply poetic prose. Elegantly braiding time, this woven narrative is calibrated by Pritchard’s exquisite erotic reckonings and resonant aesthetic reflections. In resurrecting Violet Paget/ Vernon Lee at our own historical moment (and by invoking a gallery of beloved and provocative artists and esthetes), Melissa Pritchard has provided for her readers a portrait-mirror in which to gaze—a glorious vision of both Palmerino and of a writer in pursuit of its history—one that would make even Oscar Wilde blush with envy.
— David St. John, author of The Auroras
Melissa Pritchard stands out among contemporary writers for her ability to portray the complex inner lives of her characters. As we follow them through their experiences and memories into their dreams, we’re invited to flex our own imaginations, even, if we’re willing, to become more supple thinkers, thanks to this writer’s supple prose.
— Joanna Scott, author of Follow Me
A brilliant novel whose cast of characters, strong, strange, vivid, eccentric, will make you feel enriched and enlivened, and will leave you wanting to visit, or to visit again, the rich interiors of Tuscany past and present, the opulent mysteries of its food and wine, and not least the magic of its natural landscapes and seasons. Melissa Pritchard’s delicate and precise prose achieves all this, as if casually, while capturing her reader in the forward momentum of her story.
— C.K. Stead, author of Mansfield