In the January 1777 issue of the Giornale enciclop?dico, Venetian-born journalist Elisabetta Caminer Turra reviewed a book that had been translated from French into Italian by a woman from Vicenza. Caminer praised the anony mous translator for her intellectual accomplishments: She has learned a foreign language, knows how to wield a pen, and knows how to sit at a writing table rather than at her toilette: as a result, she inspires the desire that is rare in women, that of seeing her make herself useful to her nation by translating works that can bring her real advantages or pleasures. .-1 By highlighting the contrast between the writing table and the toilette?between a useful life of intellectual work and a frivolous life focused on one's outward appearance?Caminer underscored her belief that the demands of the toilette were directly at odds with a life of independence and intellectual challenge for women. She made clear her conviction that a life of the mind could make women useful to their nation and, significantly, bring them personal pleasure and advantage. Caminer knew well the "real advantages or pleasures" of which she wrote. She could have been describing herself in this passage, since by 1777 she was already an active participant in the Republic of Letters and well known by con temporaries as an "exception" to her sex. When she published this review she had Catherine M. Sama is Associate Professor of Italian in the Department of Modern and Clas sical Languages and Literatures at the University of Rhode Island and the author of an an thology (in translation), Elisabetta Caminer Turra: Selected Writings of an 18th-Century Venetian Woman of Letters (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2003). Her current research explores the network of Venetian women shaping culture and focuses on the painter Rosalba Carriera, the poet/playwright Luisa Bergalli Gozzi, and the journalist Elisabetta Caminer Turra. Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 37, no. 3 (2004) Pp. 389-414.
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