Studio of One's Own

A Studio of One's Own: Fictional Women Painters and the Art of Fiction is a critical study of the portrayal of women artists in nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels in English, including British, American, Irish, and Canadian women writers. This book traces the gradual progression from amateur parlor painters in the novels of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and others, to the serious professional painters depicted by contemporary writers such as Margaret Atwood, Mary Gordon, and A. S. Byatt. In fiction as in history, the woman artist's working space enlarges through time - by uneven steps - from a portfolio in a cupboard to a studio or atelier where work may be completed and prepared for sale or exhibition. This working space is a measure of the claim that the artist makes upon the world. Unlike several previous critical studies, which interpret the term 'artist' broadly so as to include women writers and musicians, A Studio of One's Own restricts the subject to visual artists to allow a sharper focus on the many and varied transactions between the sister arts of painting and fiction. In particular, a writer's use of ekphrasis - verbal descriptions of works of visual art - serves to authenticate the fictional painter and to manifest the tensions between verbal and visual representation. The purpose of this book is, first, to interpret the implied dialogue of the writers with the artist figures they create so as to reveal the writer's view of creativity in both its aesthetic and political dimensions; and, second, to explore certain remarkable continuities in the imagery depicting women artists in the novels. Most notably, recurrent images present the artist as liminal and her work as suspended or unfinished, terms which reflect not only the woman painter's historic marginality, but also her creative potential. In eight of the novels under discussion, the painter lives or works at the edge of an ocean, a literally liminal position with a variety of symbolic implicati