From the acclaimed author of The Birth of Venus and In the Company of the Courtesan comes a vibrant exploration of the Italian Renaissance through the character of Isabella d'Este, the first female art collector and patron of her time. Her famed collection has long since dispersed or been lost, but what remains is her correspondence - thousands of letters preserved in a deconsecrated church and convent in the archive of Mantua.

'For the longest time after my death, those who claimed an interest in history showed little interest in me. Or indeed women like me. Nor did they seem to care much about the wonder of our city states: Mantua, Ferrara, Urbino. We may never have been as grand or powerful as Venice or Rome or Florence but our great age - this thing that is now so valued and trumpeted as the Renaissance - would have been a much lesser affair without us.'

The Marchesa is Renaissance history at its most vivid, an immersive, multi-layered experience that mixes historical fiction with biography, scholarship and imagery, of both the people and the time. It is also a meditation on our attitude to history itself, challenging how far we can set aside our own values and certainties when it comes to understanding those who grew out of very different cultural soil.