Etta Madden, Engaging Italy. American Women's Utopian Visions and Transnational Networks

Among the growing body of scholarship on the role of women in nineteenth-century transatlantic networks, Etta Madden's Engaging Italy deserves attention for its impressive, meticulous archival research in unearthing the lives and writings of three relatively unknown US women who inhabited the changing political landscape of Italy during the 1860s and 1870s.The book shows how, unlike most of their predecessors, these womenjournalist Anne Hampton Brewster, orphanage and industrial school founder Emily Bliss Gould, and translator Caroline Crane Marsh-did not travel to Italy to follow their vocation but found their calling in a country very different from the romanticized vision of so many Anglo-American travelers and expatriates.Yet like some of their precursors-most famously, Margaret Fuller, who strongly influenced their dialectical and cosmopolitan approach to culture and politics-they soon got involved in the political and religious unrest following the Italian Unification in 1861.Such involvement resulted in a profound reconsideration of their utopian visions and motivated them to start writing both privately and publicly.