I've enjoyed Maggie Humm's non-fiction very much, but the dialogue in this book meant that I did not get on with it as well. It felt a little contrived and the narrative voice was a little "tell" rather than "show".
However it did give life to characters from history who have not had many opportunities to take centre stage.

Historical fiction at its best. the story of Gwen Jones affair with Rodin. The author brings the characters alive and you feel their emotions their difficult love affair.I was caught up in their story their lives and totally involved in the novel.#netgalley #radicalwoman

I love Gwen John’s work but only had a vague idea of the facts of her life, and that drew me to Maggie Humm’s novel. It’s a fictionalised account of episodes in the life of the Welsh artist over the course of twenty years, opening when John was a student at the Slade, living in Bloomsbury and trying to plan out her future. Something made that much harder because of the growing success of her younger, more dominant brother and fellow artist Augustus John. Humm then shifts between England and France as John attempts to make a life in Paris, modelling to support her painting.

In many ways Gwen John was clearly radical for her time, very much one of the ‘new women’ who emerged in the last years of the nineteenth century. Queer, financially self-supporting, often living alone, desperate to make it as a painter in her own right. Humm’s portrait of John is exceptionally well-researched and brings out the various ways in which John flouted convention as she strived to establish herself as an artist. It’s a shame then that so much of the narrative is taken up with John’s lengthy obsession with one-time lover, the famous artist Auguste Rodin.

Rodin, like Picasso, was notorious for his affairs with younger women - when they became lovers in Paris in the early 1900s, Rodin was already in his sixties while John was still in her twenties. He soon moved on to other women yet John remained fascinated by him until his death in 1917. John’s worship of Rodin contradicts and undermines the notion of her as a liberated, self-directed woman, and I never felt that this contradiction was fully explored in Humm’s story. I think part of the problem was its narrow focus, the numerous paragraphs centred on John’s intense sexual longing for Rodin, her appreciation of his ‘manliness’ - many of which make her sound hapless, breathless and deluded.

The awkward power dynamic and the obsessive nature of John’s interest in Rodin is partly counterbalanced by episodes reconstructing John’s many relationships with women, but there’s no real sense here of the differences, other than that the women were mostly of equal social status to John’s, or of the ways in which John’s desire might have played out with women versus men. And many of the characters felt very one-dimensional including, at times, John herself.

Reading this made me realise how hard it must be to produce a fictionalised autobiography that also works as literature, Humm is definitely a capable writer, and she’s meticulous about historical detail but at the same time I found her approach a strange mix of overly informal and dryly academic, lacking any real momentum, not helped by the fact that she’s attempting to cover so much ground in a comparatively short novel. So, in the end, this really didn’t work for me. However, it’s very possible that I just wasn’t the right reader for this one. Humm’s clearly very passionate about her subject and people who really relish straightforward, historical fiction covering this era or just want a general sense of Gwen John’s early career may well get a lot more out of it.