In the summer of 2019, Harriet Constable was staying in a rental apartment in Palo Alto, California. Pulling a random book off the shelf, she started flicking through it and a sentence about an orphanage in 18th-century Venice caught her eye.

“It said Antonio Vivaldi taught there for almost his entire career, that his students were exclusively women and girls, and that they went on to become some of the greatest musicians of the 18th century,” recalls Constable.

Harriet Constable. Photo © Sophie Davidson

“I’d been a journalist for the past decade, seeking out untold true stories about remarkable women, and I come from a musical family. I was surprised that I’d never heard about this and was hooked on discovering more. I started researching right away.”

The upshot? Constable’s first novel was published in August 2024. Entitled The Instrumentalist, it is a piece of historical fiction about Anna Maria della Pietà, an orphan at the Ospedale della Pietà, for whom Vivaldi bought a violin and composed a number of concertos.

The Pietà had a famous all-female orchestra called the Figlie di coro and there is...