“With a scholar’s commitment to accurate detail, and the heart of a lover of beauty, Kathleen B. Jones’s engaging and well-crafted parallel story is as colorful and lucid as the illuminated manuscripts at the center of her novel.” —Laurel Corona, author of The Mapmaker’s Daughter
A deeply affecting dual narrative separated by several centuries, Cities of Women examines the lives of women who dare to challenge the social norms of their days, risking their reputations and livelihoods for the sake of their passions.
In the twenty-first century, we meet Verity Frazier, a disillusioned history professor who sets out to prove that the artist responsible for the illuminated artwork in Christine de Pizan’s medieval manuscripts was a remarkable woman named Anastasia. As Anastasia’s story unfolds against the exquisitely-rendered medieval backdrop of moral disaster, political intrigue, and extraordinary creativity, Verity finds her career on the brink of collapse by her efforts to uncover evidence of the lost artist’s existence.
Inspired by a decade of research, Jones has woven together a luminous and incisive masterpiece of historical fiction, evoking the spare joys and monumental pitfalls facing medieval women artists and a contemporary woman who becomes obsessed with medieval books.
About the author
Kathleen B. Jones was born and educated in New York. She holds a B.A. in political science from Brooklyn College and a Ph.D. from the political science program at CUNY’s Graduate School and Center. After teaching women’s studies for two decades at San Diego State University, she resigned to focus on writing, recently earning an M.F.A. in fiction from Fairfield University. Dr. Jones’s scholarly writing includes six books published with academic presses—three monographs and three edited anthologies of critical essays. Diving for Pearls: A Thinking Journey with Hannah Arendt won the 2015 Barbara “Penny” Kanner Book Award from the Western Association of Women Historians. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in Fiction International, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, the Briar Cliff Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She lives in Stonington, Connecticut.
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