Eleni, or, Nobody

"Eleni, or Nobody is based on the life of Greece's first woman painter, Eleni Altamura-Boukoura, who adopted the guise of a man in order to study in Italy. She married the renowned nineteenth-century Italian painter Francesco Saverio Altamura and had two children with him before he abandoned the family, leaving Eleni to return to Athens to work as a painter. When illness and tragedy befell her, Eleni retreated to her family's house on the Greek island of Spetses to live out her remaining years in isolation, amid rumors of madness and witchcraft. Rhea Galanaki's ingenious and evocative retelling of this woman's story centers on what it means to be a woman and an artist in a region struggling to develop its own identity as a nation."--Jacket.