Amazon have classified my new novel Radical Woman: Gwen John & Rodin as a historical romance, but the novel does not simply, or only, fit within that one genre because, while most of the characters are real-life people, some are not. Radical Woman is a fictional autobiography of Gwen John from the time she was a student at the Slade School of Art in 1897 to Rodin’s death in 1917 (she died in 1939). It explores Gwen’s journey from a naïve young woman to a self-confident and celebrated artist. Both Auguste Rodin and Gwen John were radical artists who challenged the conventions of art and respectability in the early years of the twentieth century. Here Gwen steps out from the shadows cast first by her brother Augustus John the painter, and then by Rodin, to play her part in the furthering the cause of female artists to be treated as equals by their male counterparts. The novel is largely set in London and Paris and focusses on pivotal moments which transform Gwen’s life.
Historical fictions are hugely popular — for example, Hilary Mantel’s Tudor trilogy, two books of which won the Booker Prize. In our uncertain times, readers want to know how the past shapes the present. Historical fictions also speak to us collectively, making us feel part of a larger world. Since women’s experiences are often underrepresented in mainstream history, fictions from a woman’s or gender-fluid point of view, like Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, can give us a granular sense of women’s historical experiences.
In simple terms historical fiction involves depicting a historical figure. Such fiction has a long history Walter Scott (Virginia Woolf’s mother Julia’s favourite author) wrote Rob Roy in 1817, through to Mantel. But all are very different. My first novel Talland House is about a fictional artist Lily Briscoe taken from Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and tells Lily’s life outside the confines of Woolf’snovel but set in historically accurate Cornwall and London. Lily solves the mystery of Mrs Ramsay’s sudden and suspicious death in Woolf’s novel!In Talland House, there are many historical figures for example, Hilary Hunt (the son of Holman Hunt the Pre-Raphaelite painter) who took Woolf to Godrevy lighthouse giving her the germ of her novel. So, I next wanted to write about a real-life artist. There are similarities between my Lily Briscoe who loses her mother when young, as did Gwen whose mother Augusta died when Gwen was eight. And my mother died when I was thirteen.
I distinguish between literary meanings and historical meanings. For me, an event is true not because I depict it exactly as the historical record, but if the event is true psychologically and symbolically. In Radical Woman, I keep to the truth of Gwen’s feelings as much as these can be known from her letters,
What happens when an author not only mixes genres (romance with history) but also interweaves the time scales of real-life historical figures with the time scale of a fiction? The short answer is sleepless nights, lying awake worrying about dates and my temerity in creating fiction from facts and ignoring some facts. Most of the characters in Radical Woman were known to Gwen, but I had to adjust chronologies, including Gwen’s, to create a smooth narrative, for example deleting some of the many house moves Gwen made in Paris to avoid confusing the reader. I have added characters, for example Hugh Ramsay, who like Gwen studied at Colarossi studio in Paris, but earlier than Gwen.
The main thing for me was not to overload with research, but like Virginia Woolf, as she said in New Biography, to use ‘the creative fact, the fertile fact, the fact that suggests and engenders’. I’ve been an academic all my life but haunted that what I’m doing is just not good enough – not really capturing the emotions of historical figures – their morals, their feelings. Wring fiction can be very liberating. You don’t have to have an argument; you can portray contradictions and Gwen had many! For example, her apparent modest appearance contrasts with her passionate love life.
There are events that are mentioned in biographies of Gwen John, but I needed to know how she would feel. So, when Gwen was at the Slade, she fell in love with a fellow artist Ambrose McEvoy who later became a famous portrait painter. And we know from biographies that the relationship did not end well. But what would Gwen be feeling at such a moment? What did McEvoy say to Gwen? Well, we’ve all been there I imagine spurned by someone? You don’t forget and so, like an actress I imagine, I used mine – that feeling of shame. I translated this emotion into another scene with Gwen and two of her very best friends Ursula Tyrwhitt and Gwen Salmon two artists, when Gwen is trying not to let them know about Rodin’s mistreatment of her.
Another way, along with projecting your own emotions into a character, is that I like walking in their footsteps, and walked with Gwen around Bloomsbury and Paris having conversations with Gwen. We know she had a soft, almost tiny voice. But I try to control my present flowing into their past. Dickens said he wore his history like a cape around his shoulders. Virginia Woolf used history to blast herself in and out of time in her novel Orlando. I use historical events as anchors – like WW1 in Radical Woman when Gwen stayed in Paris courageously through the war and nursed wounded English soldiers.
Radical Woman: Gwen John & Rodin tells an original story, capturing a historical moment when women enjoyed new opportunities while the world was descending into instability and unforeseen change. In other words, a historical fiction for our present.
(c) Maggie Humm
Maggie Humm is at:
https://www.facebook.com › maggie.humm.7
Maggie Humm (@MaggieHumm1) / Twitter
About Radical Woman: Gwen John & Rodin by Maggie Humm:
This major new novel by the best-selling Maggie Humm is the story of artist Gwen John’s tumultuous affair with the French sculptor Auguste Rodin.
This historical romance literary fiction is told in the first-person present tense. It explores Gwen’s journey from a naïve young woman to a self-confident and celebrated artist. Both Rodin and Gwen John were radical artists who challenged the conventions of art and respectability in the early years of the twentieth century. Here Gwen steps out from the shadows cast first by her brother Augustus John the painter, and then by Rodin, to play her part in the furthering the cause of female artists to be treated as equals by their male counterparts.
The novel is largely set in London and Paris between 1897 and 1917, and focusses on pivotal moments which transform Gwen’s life.
As a Slade student in London in 1897, she mixes in an artistic coterie, drinking together in Fitzrovia, dining at the Café Royal, and learning from all the famous artists of the time, which sustains and encourages Gwen in her chosen career.
Living in Paris in 1904-1917 she moves in the exciting Parisian art world and its cafes, studios, and complex heterosexual and Sapphic relationships. Gwen enjoys her life as an independent woman living alone, with her painting supported by modelling for income. One day, while modelling, Gwen meets Rodin. Having once glimpsed him, to her excitement, in the British Museum, she is delighted to be invited to model for Rodin and they begin a sexual relationship. Their affair, despite his other lovers, is passionate and for Gwen life changing. The ups and downs of their relationship produce scenes of tense confrontation and equally intense love. Gwen adjusts to her life as a cinq-à-sept mistress.
Her obsessive love for Rodin, and his increasingly casual treatment of her, threatens to stultify her painting but Gwen is continually inventive. One day Rodin visits, telling her that only she, the sole artist among his other models, can fully understand him and his art. The surprising moment transforms Gwen’s understandings about herself, and her art and that dramatic insight fully releases her into a vocation, supported by recognition of her work by a major American collector John Quinn and by the New English Art Club.
A brief afterword ‘What happened next’ completes the lives of Gwen and other real-life characters after 1917 and reveals which characters are fictional.
Order your copy online here.
