Christine de Pizan
A City of Her Own
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Women in Time is a literary biography series that brings extraordinary historical women to vivid, intimate life. Meticulously researched and powerfully told, each volume uncovers the woman behind the legend – and the world she changed simply by refusing to disappear. These are not saints. These are stories. And they matter.
Christine de Pizan: A City of Her Own tells the story of a woman who, against every social and economic obstacle, picked up a pen – and refused to put it down. Born in 14th-century Venice and raised in the treacherous political corridors of medieval Paris, Christine de Pizan lost her husband young, lived through civil war, and supported her entire household with her intellect alone. She was Europe’s first professional woman of letters – and one of the most fearless moral thinkers of her time.
Through immersive prose and unsentimental clarity, this biography traces Christine’s transformation from court widow to one of the most respected and subversive writers of her age. She didn’t only defend women in theory – she offered them a literary sanctuary in The Book of the City of Ladies, a place where their stories, intellect, and courage could endure. From sharp debates with male scholars to her awe-struck final tribute to Joan of Arc, Christine’s life was a sustained argument: that women are not the subjects of history – they are its authors.
With literary style and historical rigor, A City of Her Own brings readers inside the candlelit rooms, the political salons, the ink-stained pages where Christine built her legacy. It follows her not just as a thinker but as a mother, a worker, a strategist, and a woman who understood that memory was not a given – it had to be earned, written, and fiercely protected. This is not hagiography. It’s a map of resistance. A biography that reads like revelation.
For readers of Hilary Mantel, Zadie Smith, and Rebecca Solnit, this is a story of survival by intellect, of power in precision, and of how one woman’s refusal to disappear made it harder for the world to forget her ever again.