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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'In 1903, the artist Gwendolen Mary John travels from London to France with her companion Dorelia. Surviving on their wits and Gwen’s raw talent, the young women walk from Calais to Paris. In the new century, the world is full of promise: it is time for Gwen to step out from the shadow of her overbearing brother Augustus and seek out the great painter and sculptor Auguste Rodin. It is time to be brave and visible, to love and be loved – and time perhaps to become a hero as the stain of anti-Semitism spreads across Europe.' (Publication summary)
Notes
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Book Club notes available from publisher's website.
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Dedication: For Shterna, with love
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Epigraph:
The next tide will erase the way through the mudflats,
and everything will be again equal on all sides;
but the small, far-out island already has its
eyes closed; bewildered, the dike draws a circle
around its inhabitants who were born
into a sleep in which many worlds
are silently confused, for they rarely speak,
and every phrase is like an epitaph
-'The Island I,' Rilke 1907
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Shortlisted for the Most Underrated Book Award 2018 by the Small Press Network.
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Other Formats
- Sound recording.
Works about this Work
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Flawed Milieu
2017
single work
essay
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , March no. 389 2017; (p. 33) ‘Goldie Goldbloom has an eye for the dramatic and the morbid. Her novel about the real-life love affair, beginning in 1904, between artists Gwen John and Auguste Rodin, thirty-six years her senior, begins with a list of seventeen women – including Camille Claudel, Isadora Duncan, and Lady Victoria Sackville-West – whom Rodin allegedly bedded. One, we learn, was hit by a bus, one froze to death, three died by suicide, one from starvation, one in childbirth, one of a broken heart, one in the American bombing of Japan, one by accidental strangulation (possibly, it is suggested, during a sex act), and we all know what happened to Isadora Duncan. The last in her list is Gwendolen Mary John.’ (Introduction)
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Flawed Milieu
2017
single work
essay
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , March no. 389 2017; (p. 33) ‘Goldie Goldbloom has an eye for the dramatic and the morbid. Her novel about the real-life love affair, beginning in 1904, between artists Gwen John and Auguste Rodin, thirty-six years her senior, begins with a list of seventeen women – including Camille Claudel, Isadora Duncan, and Lady Victoria Sackville-West – whom Rodin allegedly bedded. One, we learn, was hit by a bus, one froze to death, three died by suicide, one from starvation, one in childbirth, one of a broken heart, one in the American bombing of Japan, one by accidental strangulation (possibly, it is suggested, during a sex act), and we all know what happened to Isadora Duncan. The last in her list is Gwendolen Mary John.’ (Introduction)
Awards
- 2018 shortlisted Most Underrated Book Award
- 2018 longlisted ASAL Awards — ALS Gold Medal
- 2017 shortlisted Aurealis Awards for Excellence in Australian Speculative Fiction — Fantasy Division — Novel
