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Blue Woman
Blue Woman is the fictional life of Rose Hartwood, an eminent 20th century artist. This beautiful novel charts the ebbs and flows of her personal and professional lives with great subtlety and sensitivity.
We follow Rose the artist, her rise from a bombed out house in wartime London to something close to fame in the late sixties. Then as her fame fades, she retreats to her rural hometown in Wales, where she continues to work and has an affair with a young artist twenty years her junior. Finally there is a third act, when others, her son, her lover, the trust founded in her name, gradually take on her legacy.
We also follow Rose the woman: forced to give a child up for adoption as a teenager, then a marriage that is increasingly at odds with the freedom she needs, after which she must face the question all artists must ask themselves: how to come to terms with one's own life and work?
Blue Woman gradually reveals both artist and woman in their intertwined complexity: joy, struggle, determination, achievement, regret, the inheritances of love and the consolations of beauty.
We follow Rose the artist, her rise from a bombed out house in wartime London to something close to fame in the late sixties. Then as her fame fades, she retreats to her rural hometown in Wales, where she continues to work and has an affair with a young artist twenty years her junior. Finally there is a third act, when others, her son, her lover, the trust founded in her name, gradually take on her legacy.
We also follow Rose the woman: forced to give a child up for adoption as a teenager, then a marriage that is increasingly at odds with the freedom she needs, after which she must face the question all artists must ask themselves: how to come to terms with one's own life and work?
Blue Woman gradually reveals both artist and woman in their intertwined complexity: joy, struggle, determination, achievement, regret, the inheritances of love and the consolations of beauty.
238 pages, Paperback
Published April 7, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
April 3, 2022
Exquisite at the simplest level: great story-telling built up from beautiful sentence-making.
Blue Woman is the debut novel of Jonathan Page, who combines a day-job as a technical author (including co-authorship of Temenos on IBM LinuxONE) with his real love of writing literary fiction, previously to this short-stories, several of which won prizes.
The novel had its origins in "Century", a cycle of "of closely connected short stories, spanning a century from 1916 to 2016 in a Welsh border town ... Like Jenny Erpenbeck's The Visitation or Adam Thorpe's Ulverton, the collection shows how the past lives within the present and continues to influence the future. Places and characters reoccur - the Hill Farm, the chapel, Thomas and Aggie Evans, the artist Rose Hartwood - subtly altered by war, work, love and loss. And though each story stands alone, collectively they reveal a world in slow transition."
Blue Woman extracts from this and expands on the life story of Rose Hartwood.
We first meet Rose in 1937 in the small town of Llanandred, "a shop girl from Wales [...], the disgraced daughter of a country doctor". Pregnant at a young age, seduced by a visitor to the family home, her child was taken from her for adoption and she was sent away to work in the shop of a distant relative who procedes to abuse her.
Rose is in her attic room. She can stand upright in the apex and hear the wind humming in the tiles. But she is in the private world now between her tall headboard and the crooked square of window, the sill almost level with the floor, pillows at her back and a sketchbook on her knees. She draws the vase on the dresser, as she does every other day, she draws the cherry tree with its wounded, shining bark in the garden below and the weathered wall that shields it. Drawing is how she heals herself.
The story, which ends in 2020 as the pandemic approaches, then follows her to wartime London (where she twice is the sole survivor of a bomb attack), to her marriage and the development of her extended family, and through the cycle of her artistic career, which starts in WW2 as an artist's model and then a war painter, reaches its peak, in reputation and financial success, in the late 1960s, fades in the 1970s and early 1980s in part as she deliberately develops her art away from the works that had been commercially successful, and then her reputation grows again towards the end of her life, or rather the reputation of the work, as the Foundation formed to promote it seems to find her physical presence something of an inconvenience, and her main academic promoter and biographer prefers his own story of her life and those around her.
The author explains some of the real-life artists who inspired his portrayal of Rose’s career here: https://newwelshreview.com/the-art-of...
And we also see the effect of her career on those around her, her first husband who ends his days as an alcoholic, her daughter and granddaugther from that marriage, her son given up for adoption with whom she reunites, and her second partner, an artist like her but living in her shadow.
If I had a minor reservation here it was that both her husband and her later live partner originally had jobs in insurance and banking respectively, chosen one suspects to illustrate the ultimate quotidian career. Both 'escape', to a career as an antiquarian bookseller and an artist, and aided by Rose's money and her artistic tuition, respectively. But for me the world of insurance and banking is intellectually richer and more interesting than than of an artist!
The novel is published by the relatively new press Weatherglass Books, this their fourth book, co-founded by the founder of the Republic of Consciousness Prize, Neil Griffiths, who said at the time that the press was aiming to fill a gap in the literary landscape:
And Blue Woman is precisely the sort of novel he meant - indeed my review could simply repeat the bold words in the sentence above.
I will close my review with two favourite passages:
This the origin of Rose's most famous work from which the novel takes its title, and a passage that features one of the novel's key recurring motifs, people seeing themselves as they really are in mirrors, and a key theme, of Rose's art giving her agency (the contrast to Klein's Anthropométries which were performed by models but with the artist taking the credit):
1960
London and Llanandred
In her studio, Rose looks up at the age-freckled mirror, sees the pink tips of her fingers, her yellow feet in the frozen sea of dust sheets. Las Meninas, she thinks, because of the high darkening hall and Hugh, her assistant, in the blank brightness of the distant door.
Her hips are wider than she imagined and the triangle of hair between her legs thicker and darker. The longer she stares, the stranger she becomes. It is a kind of magic. Every painting she has ever made has been about this secret other, this sister self. She told the last critic who asked that the mirror was about controlling the pour, that it let her decide how much and where the paint was applied, but that was only a half-truth, to make the process seem more rational than it was. She stares, mostly, to let some other, this stranger, enter the work.
Hugh arrives with two pots of watered-down blue house paint. Without a word he slops the paint onto her chest, her stomach, her pubic hair. He pauses as she turns to stand side-on to the mirror and when she nods, he covers one arm and part of her outer thigh. They go on like this, Rose turning and Hugh pouring until both pots are empty. A wing of blue hangs for a moment from her buttocks and then falls.
—All right? Enough?
—Yes thanks, Hugh.
She rolls gently from side to side on the enormous canvas, laid flat on the floor of the studio. Her hair is a flail, her hands paw the paint to thicken or thin the form.
Tomorrow, she will draw a second, more detailed figure in thin black strokes over the first. She may or may not repaint the black eyes as white diamonds in memory of her fierce dogs. But it is the Blue Woman, the record of her body, that people will see before anything else. It is a conscious response to Klein and to a lesser degree Matisse. Though as she says in interviews, she is not a model or a muse, she is not dragged or arranged; she moves across the canvas however she wants, the choices are all hers.
And this from towards the novel's end and after Rose's death. Her daughter is giving a speech to the Rose Hartwood Foundation in the chapel consecrated to her artwork, and remembers one of her paintings, inspired by her first escape-from-death in WW2, as well as how Rose succeeded as a woman in a male-dominated work by contiuning to re-define and develop her work.
While she was drafting her speech she remembered a painting from a private collection, a work she knows only from a monograph. The painting, from the mid- to late-forties, depicts a naked woman standing on the upper floor of a ruined building, large-eyed dogs with gaping jaws patrolling the rubble below. The woman is her mother, her escape, twice, from German bombs is well known, but the vulnerability of the woman, the viciousness of the dogs, unsettled her.
Rose Hartwood's artistic success was never a given, though in hindsight, from this beautiful building, it may seem it. The art world was male then. The world of work was male. For most of her career, the ideal for women was the housewife and mother. She was angry at her for years for not being like those other mothers, for not mothering her as she was supposed to. But she sees now that she needed steel to keep going, to overcome the idea that women artists, like Eileen Agar, like Margaret Mellis, like Grace Pailthorpe, her near contemporaries in the surrealist movement, were marginal figures, imitators, the beneficiaries of male innovations.
— I think that's why she kept reinventing herself, was always finding new ways to make and think about art.
Recommended - and I would strongly urge all readers to subscribe to this wonderful new press: https://weatherglassbooks.com/shop/we...
Blue Woman is the debut novel of Jonathan Page, who combines a day-job as a technical author (including co-authorship of Temenos on IBM LinuxONE) with his real love of writing literary fiction, previously to this short-stories, several of which won prizes.
The novel had its origins in "Century", a cycle of "of closely connected short stories, spanning a century from 1916 to 2016 in a Welsh border town ... Like Jenny Erpenbeck's The Visitation or Adam Thorpe's Ulverton, the collection shows how the past lives within the present and continues to influence the future. Places and characters reoccur - the Hill Farm, the chapel, Thomas and Aggie Evans, the artist Rose Hartwood - subtly altered by war, work, love and loss. And though each story stands alone, collectively they reveal a world in slow transition."
Blue Woman extracts from this and expands on the life story of Rose Hartwood.
We first meet Rose in 1937 in the small town of Llanandred, "a shop girl from Wales [...], the disgraced daughter of a country doctor". Pregnant at a young age, seduced by a visitor to the family home, her child was taken from her for adoption and she was sent away to work in the shop of a distant relative who procedes to abuse her.
Rose is in her attic room. She can stand upright in the apex and hear the wind humming in the tiles. But she is in the private world now between her tall headboard and the crooked square of window, the sill almost level with the floor, pillows at her back and a sketchbook on her knees. She draws the vase on the dresser, as she does every other day, she draws the cherry tree with its wounded, shining bark in the garden below and the weathered wall that shields it. Drawing is how she heals herself.
The story, which ends in 2020 as the pandemic approaches, then follows her to wartime London (where she twice is the sole survivor of a bomb attack), to her marriage and the development of her extended family, and through the cycle of her artistic career, which starts in WW2 as an artist's model and then a war painter, reaches its peak, in reputation and financial success, in the late 1960s, fades in the 1970s and early 1980s in part as she deliberately develops her art away from the works that had been commercially successful, and then her reputation grows again towards the end of her life, or rather the reputation of the work, as the Foundation formed to promote it seems to find her physical presence something of an inconvenience, and her main academic promoter and biographer prefers his own story of her life and those around her.
The author explains some of the real-life artists who inspired his portrayal of Rose’s career here: https://newwelshreview.com/the-art-of...
And we also see the effect of her career on those around her, her first husband who ends his days as an alcoholic, her daughter and granddaugther from that marriage, her son given up for adoption with whom she reunites, and her second partner, an artist like her but living in her shadow.
If I had a minor reservation here it was that both her husband and her later live partner originally had jobs in insurance and banking respectively, chosen one suspects to illustrate the ultimate quotidian career. Both 'escape', to a career as an antiquarian bookseller and an artist, and aided by Rose's money and her artistic tuition, respectively. But for me the world of insurance and banking is intellectually richer and more interesting than than of an artist!
The novel is published by the relatively new press Weatherglass Books, this their fourth book, co-founded by the founder of the Republic of Consciousness Prize, Neil Griffiths, who said at the time that the press was aiming to fill a gap in the literary landscape:
For the last five years or so small presses have been doing a lot of the heavy lifting in UK publishing and with much success. But they tend to focus on either formally inventive fiction or translations. The space for core literary fiction has been squeezed and books which are merely excellent can find themselves homeless.
Running the Republic of Consciousness Prize I read hundreds of novels from small presses and loved a great many, but I did feel an absence of novels that were somehow exquisite at the simplest level: great story-telling built up from beautiful sentence-making.
And Blue Woman is precisely the sort of novel he meant - indeed my review could simply repeat the bold words in the sentence above.
I will close my review with two favourite passages:
This the origin of Rose's most famous work from which the novel takes its title, and a passage that features one of the novel's key recurring motifs, people seeing themselves as they really are in mirrors, and a key theme, of Rose's art giving her agency (the contrast to Klein's Anthropométries which were performed by models but with the artist taking the credit):
1960
London and Llanandred
In her studio, Rose looks up at the age-freckled mirror, sees the pink tips of her fingers, her yellow feet in the frozen sea of dust sheets. Las Meninas, she thinks, because of the high darkening hall and Hugh, her assistant, in the blank brightness of the distant door.
Her hips are wider than she imagined and the triangle of hair between her legs thicker and darker. The longer she stares, the stranger she becomes. It is a kind of magic. Every painting she has ever made has been about this secret other, this sister self. She told the last critic who asked that the mirror was about controlling the pour, that it let her decide how much and where the paint was applied, but that was only a half-truth, to make the process seem more rational than it was. She stares, mostly, to let some other, this stranger, enter the work.
Hugh arrives with two pots of watered-down blue house paint. Without a word he slops the paint onto her chest, her stomach, her pubic hair. He pauses as she turns to stand side-on to the mirror and when she nods, he covers one arm and part of her outer thigh. They go on like this, Rose turning and Hugh pouring until both pots are empty. A wing of blue hangs for a moment from her buttocks and then falls.
—All right? Enough?
—Yes thanks, Hugh.
She rolls gently from side to side on the enormous canvas, laid flat on the floor of the studio. Her hair is a flail, her hands paw the paint to thicken or thin the form.
Tomorrow, she will draw a second, more detailed figure in thin black strokes over the first. She may or may not repaint the black eyes as white diamonds in memory of her fierce dogs. But it is the Blue Woman, the record of her body, that people will see before anything else. It is a conscious response to Klein and to a lesser degree Matisse. Though as she says in interviews, she is not a model or a muse, she is not dragged or arranged; she moves across the canvas however she wants, the choices are all hers.
And this from towards the novel's end and after Rose's death. Her daughter is giving a speech to the Rose Hartwood Foundation in the chapel consecrated to her artwork, and remembers one of her paintings, inspired by her first escape-from-death in WW2, as well as how Rose succeeded as a woman in a male-dominated work by contiuning to re-define and develop her work.
While she was drafting her speech she remembered a painting from a private collection, a work she knows only from a monograph. The painting, from the mid- to late-forties, depicts a naked woman standing on the upper floor of a ruined building, large-eyed dogs with gaping jaws patrolling the rubble below. The woman is her mother, her escape, twice, from German bombs is well known, but the vulnerability of the woman, the viciousness of the dogs, unsettled her.
Rose Hartwood's artistic success was never a given, though in hindsight, from this beautiful building, it may seem it. The art world was male then. The world of work was male. For most of her career, the ideal for women was the housewife and mother. She was angry at her for years for not being like those other mothers, for not mothering her as she was supposed to. But she sees now that she needed steel to keep going, to overcome the idea that women artists, like Eileen Agar, like Margaret Mellis, like Grace Pailthorpe, her near contemporaries in the surrealist movement, were marginal figures, imitators, the beneficiaries of male innovations.
— I think that's why she kept reinventing herself, was always finding new ways to make and think about art.
Recommended - and I would strongly urge all readers to subscribe to this wonderful new press: https://weatherglassbooks.com/shop/we...
April 24, 2022
This is the third novel and fourth book published by Weatherglass Books, and so far their standard has remained pretty high, and they are all very different. It tells the life story and legacy of a female painter in chronological order from 1937 (when she is working as a young shop assistant in a Welsh village and has already been forced to give up a child for adoption) to the present day.
The main protagonist Rose is a strong character, and Page largely succeeds in explaining her importance, the difficult choices she faced pursuing her vocation and the difficulties of competing in a very male artistic establishment. The descriptive writing is evocative, and the whole thing is a very impressive first novel.
The main protagonist Rose is a strong character, and Page largely succeeds in explaining her importance, the difficult choices she faced pursuing her vocation and the difficulties of competing in a very male artistic establishment. The descriptive writing is evocative, and the whole thing is a very impressive first novel.
April 9, 2022
I received this book as part of my subscription to Weatherglass Books. Weatherglass is a new small publisher which describes itself on its website like this:
”Weatherglass Books is a new independent press founded by Neil Griffiths (novelist and founder of the Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses) and Damian Lanigan (novelist and playwright).
Weatherglass was founded on a shared love of Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower and a shared fear that it wouldn’t find a publisher today.
Weatherglass Books wants to clear a space for the next The Blue Flower.”
Or, as Neil Griffiths goes on to explain, Weatherglass is looking for books that are ”exquisite at the simplest level: great story-telling built up from beautiful sentence-making”
And so, Blue Woman. This is Jonathan Page’s first novel. You can read a sample here: https://embarkliteraryjournal.com/iss.... This excerpt ends with an author’s statement which explains the origins of the novel:
”Blue Woman began as a series of short stories, several of them prize-winning, spanning a century in a small provincial town. I wrote a handful of stories for each decade, from the end of the First World War to the near-present. As I neared the end of the project, I saw that Rose’s stories were a complete cycle in their own right. Through Rose I could explore the idea that the past isn’t a foreign country at all, but close at hand, a living presence. She could also show me what changes, and what persists, through the many lives of a single lifetime.”
And that’s probably all you need to know prior to reading this book. Here is a novel that aims to be beautiful at the sentence level and which tells you the story of Rose Hartwood beginning just prior to the Second World War and running right through to the advent of COVID (and that’s a lot to fit into 236 pages).
And it is full of carefully crafted sentences. For my reading tastes, the care taken over the sentences probably distracted me a bit. This is entirely a matter of personal taste, but I found that the narrative held me at a distance from the characters and I couldn’t help thinking of Siri Hustvedt’s “The Blazing World” which also explores the life of a female artist struggling to gain recognition in a male-dominated world but which does that in a way that I found much more intimate and which also invites the reader into the art itself in a way that I didn’t experience as I read Blue Woman.
This is a book that I enjoyed reading but that I didn’t really find myself getting excited about. Giving it 3 stars seems mean because it is better than that, but it doesn’t feel to me like a 4-star book. Quandary.
”Weatherglass Books is a new independent press founded by Neil Griffiths (novelist and founder of the Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses) and Damian Lanigan (novelist and playwright).
Weatherglass was founded on a shared love of Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower and a shared fear that it wouldn’t find a publisher today.
Weatherglass Books wants to clear a space for the next The Blue Flower.”
Or, as Neil Griffiths goes on to explain, Weatherglass is looking for books that are ”exquisite at the simplest level: great story-telling built up from beautiful sentence-making”
And so, Blue Woman. This is Jonathan Page’s first novel. You can read a sample here: https://embarkliteraryjournal.com/iss.... This excerpt ends with an author’s statement which explains the origins of the novel:
”Blue Woman began as a series of short stories, several of them prize-winning, spanning a century in a small provincial town. I wrote a handful of stories for each decade, from the end of the First World War to the near-present. As I neared the end of the project, I saw that Rose’s stories were a complete cycle in their own right. Through Rose I could explore the idea that the past isn’t a foreign country at all, but close at hand, a living presence. She could also show me what changes, and what persists, through the many lives of a single lifetime.”
And that’s probably all you need to know prior to reading this book. Here is a novel that aims to be beautiful at the sentence level and which tells you the story of Rose Hartwood beginning just prior to the Second World War and running right through to the advent of COVID (and that’s a lot to fit into 236 pages).
And it is full of carefully crafted sentences. For my reading tastes, the care taken over the sentences probably distracted me a bit. This is entirely a matter of personal taste, but I found that the narrative held me at a distance from the characters and I couldn’t help thinking of Siri Hustvedt’s “The Blazing World” which also explores the life of a female artist struggling to gain recognition in a male-dominated world but which does that in a way that I found much more intimate and which also invites the reader into the art itself in a way that I didn’t experience as I read Blue Woman.
This is a book that I enjoyed reading but that I didn’t really find myself getting excited about. Giving it 3 stars seems mean because it is better than that, but it doesn’t feel to me like a 4-star book. Quandary.
April 3, 2022
See here for a detailed review (with extensive quotes)
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
April 5, 2022
A beautiful book that captures the visual language of painting and the life of Rose Hartwood, a role defying 20th century artist. The language is carefully rendered. Exceedingly visual in its descriptions and lovingly narrated - a story that had me enraptured from beginning to end
July 25, 2022
Blue Woman has a classic feel all over it. In fact if it wasn’t published in 2022, it would be a book featured on the Backlisted podcast; The characters are well defined, an interesting story which relies on the importance of details and there’s a topical edge. The highest compliment I can give that if The Booker did not have the 2014 rule change this would have been shortlisted.
The book opens in 1939 Rose is a painter, or a least she has the talent. After being abused by her boss’ husband she runs of too London in order to immerse herself in the art world and manages, her most famous painting is Blue Woman. In the meantime she falls in love and has other romantic adventures. Time, as it does moves on but Rose’s past seems to stick with her.
Blue Woman questions whether a love for art and the art of love can be separated. It also features how some attitudes change over decades and the chameleonic properties of time. This is a satisfying novel but I do have one complaint and that, despite it’s beauty, I found the prose to be oddly stilted at times, even a bit robotic, not too dissimilar to an instruction manual. Whenever this occurred I would read the book aloud and I’d be on the right track again but it did happen quite a few times.
Blue Woman is the third novel from relatively new press, Weatherglass, whose aim is to publish plot based stories. After the brilliant Cold New Climate and Blue Woman (I still have to read The Angels of L19) , I am certain that they are on the right path.
The book opens in 1939 Rose is a painter, or a least she has the talent. After being abused by her boss’ husband she runs of too London in order to immerse herself in the art world and manages, her most famous painting is Blue Woman. In the meantime she falls in love and has other romantic adventures. Time, as it does moves on but Rose’s past seems to stick with her.
Blue Woman questions whether a love for art and the art of love can be separated. It also features how some attitudes change over decades and the chameleonic properties of time. This is a satisfying novel but I do have one complaint and that, despite it’s beauty, I found the prose to be oddly stilted at times, even a bit robotic, not too dissimilar to an instruction manual. Whenever this occurred I would read the book aloud and I’d be on the right track again but it did happen quite a few times.
Blue Woman is the third novel from relatively new press, Weatherglass, whose aim is to publish plot based stories. After the brilliant Cold New Climate and Blue Woman (I still have to read The Angels of L19) , I am certain that they are on the right path.
January 31, 2023
Exquisite.
May 13, 2022
I loved being in Rose's mind from seventeen through her early nineties as she became a highly successful artist in England. The novel starts during WWII after she gives her son up for adoption. Her rise from dire straits, although raised by a doctor father who did not value women, is driven by her determination to paint and to paint her truth. Most of the men who meet Rose are highly supportive and value her and her art. (except for her father) Her tenacity to draw and paint in spite of viewers who scandalize her, continues to be the major passion in her life. Jonathon Page excels in writing a fictional biography with depth, intensity and enduring relationships. I look forward to his next novel!
July 9, 2022
Blue Woman is my first exposure to Weatherglass Books, a press founded on the idea of "great story-telling built up from beautiful sentence-making." I would say that this debut novel lives up to that goal. Page's beauty is not the beauty of Gass or James, whose sentences spiral like labyrinths so dense that you could live in them, given a source of water. Page is more restrained in comparison, but his images have the hardness and sparkle of jewels. Frequently when reading I came across a turn of phrase that made me think "wow, I never saw it that way," and in that sense this book granted me one of the great pleasures of literature, that of being able to see the world you have always lived in with new eyes and feel its pulsations with a new heart.
June 23, 2026
When a female artist is obsessed by her art how do her loved ones react? And what endures after her death?
1937. After she is forced to give up her baby for adoption, Rose flees rural Wales to pursue her love of art in London. In the ruins of the post-war city, she marries insurance agent Ron, but her art always comes first.
Her reputation builds and she donates a painting – “Blue Woman” – to her long lost son, David, prompting disaster. As Rose achieves success, Ron is directionless and their daughter Emma neglected. A retreat back to Wales renews Rose’s creativity but accelerates Ron’s decline.
A retrospective exhibition in the 1980s forces Rose’s extended family to confront the past, and the emotional price of her art.
Was the trauma of her adolescence in Wales and the London Blitz the impetus for Rose’s obsession with painting? In a man, her extreme focus might have been admired – in a woman, it is seen as an eccentricity, even an aberration.
The episodic style of the novel, with intense scenes interspersed by gaps of several years, is at first disconcerting (although the year is always handily referenced at the top of the page). But we are in safe hands. The author honed his craft with short stories and is a master at providing just enough information for the reader to work out what has taken place in the intervening years.
The prose is simply beautiful, delineating scenes in spare, economic brushstrokes. At times of high emotion, Rose notices small visual details, as if she is always sketching in her mind, even when she has no brush or pencil to hand.
The titular artwork, “Blue Woman”, is practically a separate character in the narrative. Born in 1960, she prompts outrage in rural Wales, then adoration. After nearly being lost, she returns to her creator’s artistic home.
The scenes from the viewpoint of Rose’s husband, daughter, son and studio assistant shed light on the difficulty of domestic life with an artist. These are so well crafted I wonder whether the author has direct personal experience.
Come for the exquisite prose and careful recreation of the modern art scene of the 60s and 70s. Stay for the gentle portrait of rural Wales and the arc of a long creative life, with all its desperate troughs and transcendent joy.
1937. After she is forced to give up her baby for adoption, Rose flees rural Wales to pursue her love of art in London. In the ruins of the post-war city, she marries insurance agent Ron, but her art always comes first.
Her reputation builds and she donates a painting – “Blue Woman” – to her long lost son, David, prompting disaster. As Rose achieves success, Ron is directionless and their daughter Emma neglected. A retreat back to Wales renews Rose’s creativity but accelerates Ron’s decline.
A retrospective exhibition in the 1980s forces Rose’s extended family to confront the past, and the emotional price of her art.
Was the trauma of her adolescence in Wales and the London Blitz the impetus for Rose’s obsession with painting? In a man, her extreme focus might have been admired – in a woman, it is seen as an eccentricity, even an aberration.
The episodic style of the novel, with intense scenes interspersed by gaps of several years, is at first disconcerting (although the year is always handily referenced at the top of the page). But we are in safe hands. The author honed his craft with short stories and is a master at providing just enough information for the reader to work out what has taken place in the intervening years.
The prose is simply beautiful, delineating scenes in spare, economic brushstrokes. At times of high emotion, Rose notices small visual details, as if she is always sketching in her mind, even when she has no brush or pencil to hand.
The titular artwork, “Blue Woman”, is practically a separate character in the narrative. Born in 1960, she prompts outrage in rural Wales, then adoration. After nearly being lost, she returns to her creator’s artistic home.
The scenes from the viewpoint of Rose’s husband, daughter, son and studio assistant shed light on the difficulty of domestic life with an artist. These are so well crafted I wonder whether the author has direct personal experience.
Come for the exquisite prose and careful recreation of the modern art scene of the 60s and 70s. Stay for the gentle portrait of rural Wales and the arc of a long creative life, with all its desperate troughs and transcendent joy.
July 26, 2022
A romantic read that explores the nuances of being a free-spirited and sensual woman in an era when women’s creativity was repressed. I found the book to be lacking energy for its majority with the main character Rose boring me at times. It became a much more engaging read as she aged and reflected on her youth and legacy.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 25, 2023
Beautifully written, but I thought the story a little over-extended. Also, curiously, the character of Rose was less well drawn for me than those around her - Ron, John, David and Emma. She is not as vivid as her Blue Woman painting. Maybe that's the point - she lives through her art. Overall, though, an engrossing read.
August 11, 2022
Gently engaging
July 18, 2022
Blue Woman is a large avant-garde portrait created by Rose Hartwood, a fictional artist of growing repute in the London artworld. The canvas is striking, and carries the weight of Rose’s distressing personal history, something that becomes clear when it is transported to the small Welsh community where she grew up and put on display. There is something of the real life Welsh artist, Gwen John, about Rose, but her creative life develops in 1940s wartime London and flourishes there, despite, perhaps because of, her blighted childhood and adolescence, and her adult struggles with intimate relationships. This is a debut novel from Jonathan Page, but already he has the sure touch of plotting a satisfyingly circular tale where destructive incidents beget good outcomes. Perhaps most of all, Blue Woman is a book to be savoured for its subtle painterly descriptions; impressionistic strokes and colours to delight the imagination.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews