Author of the week: Sarah Dunant

last updated 8 January 2015

Sarah Dunant can’t always stomach her own historical fictions, said Paola Totaro in the Melbourne Age. The author of the best-selling The Birth of Venus started writing a trilogy about 15th-century Italy because she was determined to explore how women experienced the Renaissance. But the former BBC broadcaster started the series’ final book by inventing a spunky adolescent heroine and locking her in a convent, and soon became so angry she couldn’t continue. “A lot of you wants to say, ‘This so sucks, this is so not okay, this is really criminal what happened to women,’” she says. Fully half of the era’s noblewomen, she learned, ended up in nunneries, largely because families couldn’t afford more than one wedding dowry. Dunant’s resulting writer’s block lasted four months.

Sacred Hearts, the novel that emerged from that dark period, moved forward only after Dunant scolded herself into looking at the 15th century through the eyes of a woman of the period, said Joanna Moorhead in The New Review. The most likely alternatives to convent life, she realized, were a loveless marriage or death during childbirth. By contrast, she says, “convents were places of deep creativity, where women got space to do things that they wouldn’t have been able to do in the outside world.” That theme, she says, seems to resonate with 21st-century women. “They say, ‘How interesting—a world without men.’”