Jacqueline Marie Musacchio, the professor of art at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, has succeeded in bringing the Florence-based American artist Francesca Alexander out of the shadow cast by her friendship with John Ruskin, the leading art historian of the Victorian era, who met Alexander on a trip to Tuscany in 1882 and became a friend and admirer over the succeeding decade.

Although Alexander is now little known, she received attention during her lifetime, becoming something of a celebrity in Italy, Britain and her birthplace, the US. The rare published references to her—without much hint of her broader repertoire—rely on the work for which she is best remembered: handwritten, delicately illustrated and poetic English translations of Tuscan folk ballads and songs (rispetti) that Ruskin did much to champion.