Your review of “Brilliant Women,” a current show at London’s National Portrait Gallery, is an entertaining read (“Clever Girls,” March 22, 2008). The portraits of Eighteenth-Century intellectuals who happened to have been women is a worthy testimony of our own time, not only theirs. “These portraits are public statements,” you point out. “But for women then, public meant immodest. A learned woman’s morals were always suspect, especially if she earned her living.” Wonderfully put, indeed, even if a dash too glib. Two centuries earlier, in Venice, it was precisely the women who earned their living by their own wits that ushered the era of clever girls across Europe. They were courtesans. Or “honest” courtesans, to be a bit more precise. Veronica Franco has come to exemplify them at their best, as witnessed by Margaret F. Rosenthal’s The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1992). In 1580, on Michele Montaigne’s visit to the then cultural capital of Europe, her servants presented him with a copy of a book of hers, and he dutifully recorded it in his journal. Perhaps it was the Venetian salons of the time that tainted the reputation of women intellectuals for centuries to come. As well as offered a welcome hint as to how to earn a decent living in the world of supercilious men.