The Venice Sketchbook

Juliet Browning, an English woman, is the primary heroine of The Venice Sketchbook. In 1928, she visits Venice for the first time with her Aunt Hortensia as an 18th birthday present. She falls in love with the city and is captivated by Leonardo Da Rossi.

Juliet, called “Lettie” by her family, aspires to be an artist, but her dreams are quickly crushed by her family’s losses in the Great Depression. She is able to return to the city of her dreams, however, when she gains the opportunity to attend the Accademia di Belle Arti on a pension from a patron of the school where she teaches.

Juliet struggles between duty and happiness, and she experiences many misfortunes due to familial expectation, Precarity Due to Gender, Wealth, or Identity, and war. As an older woman, Juliet is reserved and reveals very little about herself; she does, however, leave clues for her grand-niece, Caroline, to discover, and some of these clues lead Caroline closer to achieving the life Juliet was never able to have.

Juliet’s primary storyline leads from young hope to disillusionment, then back to hope and self-expression before falling downward to heartbreak. She regularly makes sacrifices for duty and those she loves, and in the process she becomes adept at