Evelina: A Victorian Heroine in Venice

Description

Evelina van Millingen Pisani was a modern woman in the age of Queen Victoria. She was born in Constantinople in 1831 to an eccentric French mother and an English father, who was a doctor accused of having murdered Lord Byron. Educated in Papal Rome until the age of eighteen, she was whisked back to Constantinople by her father, now working for the sultan. While visiting Venice, this striking beauty of twenty-two met and married the wealthy Count Pisani. Evelina became an exotic star in the firmament of wealthy American and English socialites, artists, and writers, for whom the artistic decadence of Venice was an antidote to the factories, materialism, and homophobic laws they saw at home. In her circle of friends were Isabella Stewart Gardner and an admiring Henry James. When her husband died after twenty-seven years of marriage, the grieving countess unexpectedly found herself saddled with his mortgage debts. Inheriting the vast but rundown Pisani estate in the misty flatlands near Padua, Evelina took full charge. Becoming a hands-on farmer, she restored swampland, built an English garden, and created a model farm for hundreds of tenant farmers. Through it all, she remained a pillar in the admiring Venetian set.

Judith Harris is the author of 'Pompeii Awakened, A Story of Rediscovery' (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007, 2014), and of 'The Monster in the Closet' (Franklin, Tennessee: American History Imprints, 2012). As a freelance American journalist based in Rome, she has been a regular contributor to 'ARTnews', 'Current Archaeology', 'Time' magazine, 'The Wall Street Journal' and the on-line magazine 'i-italy.org'. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, she is a graduate of Northwestern University, Evanston.