Radical Woman

"A vividly imagined and deeply researched portrait of one of the 20th century's greatest artists. Gwen John springs from the page in all her brilliance and complexity." - Annabel Abbs, prize winning novelist of The Joyce Girl, Frieda, and The Language of Food

"Maggie Humm's novel, is a marvellous portrait of a singular artist who, even as she fell under the dominant spell of the French master, was stubbornly refining her own vision more or less in his shadow. The author gives us the creative ferment around Bloomsbury and The Slade at the turn of the twentieth century, in which Gwen developed her craft in the fruitfully competitive hotbed of student life. We travel with her across France, open to experience and adventure. We see her growing obsession with and attachment to Rodin in Paris. She longed to be more than one of his mistresses, yet her relative solitude, in sparsely furnished rooms, left her free to paint the wonderful portraits and self-portraits that posterity has found to be among the defining images of that period. Written in the form of a fictional autobiography, Gwen negotiates the conflicting challenges of other people's demands with her own anxieties, of sex, money, artistic integrity. This novel gives us a deep, authentic portrayal of a female artist in her time." - Prize-winning novelist Tim Pears, FRSL, author of In the Place of Fallen Leaves and the West Country Trilogy.