In A Dark Wood Wandering: A Short Story
The novella In A Dark Wood Wandering weaves two storylines between the modern day and early Renaissance Florence.
Leaving behind a depersonalised world, a young woman seeks a retreat working in a convent in the hills above Florence. Here, she soon discovers, resides an Irish Mother Superior with a Machiavellian agenda against a communist mayor and invading archeologists. She soon has 'la donna bella' helping to exhume some old graves at the convent, some of which date back to the early Renaissance.
In one of the graves she unexpectedly finds the remains of a young woman of wealth, buried with her child - and someone else. The woman belongs to the story of the earlier era. A daughter of a newly-rich merchant and a greedy mother, she is unusual for her time in that her father has taught her to read. The day before her father finalises her arranged marriage, he takes her to the Badia, to hear Boccaccio reading from the works of Dante. Whilst there, her life is irrevocably changed.
Through the interweaving of these worlds, both young women - both unnamed throughout the novella --learn not only how to lose loss but also that to be un-noticed is not synonymous with invisibility, nor worthlessness. Both learn to see themselves.
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