Review of "Sophie de Tott: Artist in a Time of Revolution".

A very kind review of "Sophie de Tott" by Julia Sara Porter on Bookworm Reviews.

Julia Gasper's previous book, Elizabeth Craven: Writer, Feminist and

European covered the life of Elizabeth Baroness Craven, Princess

Berkeley Magravine of Brandenburg-Anspach. She was a brilliant woman whose travels and writings challenged the roles expected of women. She deserves to be recognized with other early feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft who led the path for other women to put those concerns from writing into activism.

Gasper's latest book, Sophie de Tott: Artist in a Time of Revolution,

is a biography about another woman with immense talent who was  

neglected by history. This woman was Sophie de Tott (1758-1848) and like Craven, she too lived a colorful life as a portrait painter, novelist, musician, and secret agent. This book reveals her as a strong-willed woman with great talent, a strong sense of liberty and equality, and a scandalous personal life in which she lived according

to her own terms.

Gasper wrote about Tott: "She is one of innumerable neglected women artists and wherever we find any allusions of her in catalogs and indexes, she is treated as an obscure painter of perhaps one or two works. In fact, there are about fifty works of hers that can definitely be listed, and possibly many others that have yet to be

discovered."

Tott is yet another of those women who patriarchal history has ignored only to be rediscovered and recognized by feminist scholars. Similar to Elizabeth Craven, herself, and the women in Nina Ansary's book Anonymous is a Woman.

Tott's early life taught her a great deal about independence and

liberty. She was born in Constantinople in 1758 ...

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