Frances Mayes

Frances Mayes was born in Fitzgerald, Georgia, in 1940, taught creative writing at San Francisco State University, and bought a ruined farmhouse in Cortona, Tuscany, in 1990 with her partner Edward Mayes. She was not the first American to write about restoring an Italian property, but Under the Tuscan Sun (1996) was so successful that it retroactively seemed to create the genre.

The book is about renovation and food and landscape and the particular quality of Tuscan light, but it is really about the decision to reorganise a life around pleasure rather than ambition — a theme that resonated powerfully with American readers in the mid-1990s. It spent two and a half years on the New York Times bestseller list.

The Tuscan Sun series continued with Bella Tuscany (1999), Every Day in Tuscany (2010), and A Year in the World (2006), which expanded the model to other Mediterranean destinations. Her novel Swan (2002) returned to her Georgia childhood.

She is honest in the books about what the enterprise costs — financially and emotionally — and about the difference between the fantasy of Italian life and its realities. The renovation is more expensive and more difficult than she planned; the locals are helpful but not merely decorative; the Italy she inhabits is less picturesque and more complicated than the Italy of tourist imagination.