Lizzie and Dante

Lizzie and Dante is Eloisa James’s 2021 contemporary romance, a notable departure for a writer who has spent most of her career writing Regency historical romances under the same name. Eloisa James is also Mary Bly, an English literature professor at Fordham University who specializes in Shakespeare, and the contemporary novel let her draw on a different set of materials than her historical work usually allows.

The story is set on the Italian island of Elba, where Lizzie Delford, a thirty something American Shakespeare scholar, has come to spend a summer recovering from a difficult diagnosis. She is on the island with her best friend Gray and Gray’s husband, and she has decided that the rest of her time is going to be spent in beauty and pleasure rather than in the slow hospital corridors that have defined the past year. Dante is an Italian chef she meets at the beach, who is summering on Elba with his daughter Etta. The romance that develops between Lizzie and Dante is shadowed from the start by what Lizzie has not yet told him, and the novel is honest about how that kind of secret weighs on a relationship that started as a vacation fling.

Eloisa James writes about cancer with the unsparing honesty of a novelist who has lived through her own cancer experience. The autobiographical material gives the book emotional weight that her historical romances rarely carry, and the literary references that thread through the novel, from Shakespeare to Jane Austen to the Italian poets, never feel pasted on. Lizzie is a fully realized adult woman with a real interior life, and Dante is allowed to be a character rather than just a romantic prop.

For readers who came to Eloisa James through her Bridgerton era Regency romances, Lizzie and Dante is a different kind of pleasure. For new readers, it works beautifully as a standalone. For anyone who has gone through serious illness or loved someone who has, the novel offers a romance that does not pretend the difficult parts away.