This is a taste of life in Venice from the passionate points of view of young nobleman's daughters. The elegant drama unfolds scene by scene, in a plot that features the daughters as agents in their own fate. The first girl escapes a castle ruled by her father, the lord of the area, and she explores the depths of the city. How does she fare? She finds herself injured, indebted to a young Jewish man whom she falls in love with. She changed her vocation, her family, and her religion by escaping the authority of her father.
What is this a portrait of? It is a bildungsroman, a portrait of a young woman's growing sense of authority and autonomy. Throughout the novel, Donata learns how to get away with doing what she wants, and she often teases or betrays knowledge about her father's opinion, assuming her father would not be thrilled to find her breaking all the rules. But that is her primary character trait; she is a deeply intellectual girl with a curious appetite for knowledge that makes arbitrary rules suddenly not good enough to contain her. To be precise, she is not exactly anti-authoritarian, as she still loves her father and wants his approval. She just treats authority systems as a game.
She is a dancer among dancers, one might say. Her role in the dance is to bloom, to become, like a plant emerging from the dirt. The steps in this blooming process are her escape from the limited view of her father's patriarchy, the discovery of romantic and sexual passion with Noe, and eventually the discovery of one's autonomous relationship to own's one self. She changes her religion as evidence of her own self-dominion. In the end we see her becoming a philosophy student and a tutor of women, as an homage to her curiosity and free spirit. She is authoritative because she behaves according to her own sovereignty. In other words, she thirsts for responsibility.
