A Woman With No Clothes On

V.R. Main

ISBN 10: 0953911977 / ISBN 13: 9780953911974

Published by Delancey Press Ltd, London, UK, 2008

About this Item

Well bound in brown cloth boards with gilt titling to spine. Corners and spine ends all very good. Text pages and end papers are all clean with no previous owner inscriptions. Flat signed by author to half title page. Dust jacket is unclipped but does have some edge rubbing and a closed tear to one leading edge. Protected now in a removable clear cover. Despatched same or next working day in protective packaging.

Seller Inventory # 013372

Bibliographic Details

• Title: A Woman With No Clothes On
• Publisher: Delancey Press Ltd, London, UK
• Publication Date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0953911977
• ISBN 13: 9780953911974
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Good
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)

About this title

Synopsis

A Woman with No Clothes On won the Trafalgar prize for work in progress in 2005. In 1967 in a laboratory in the Louvre, a radiologist discovers a picture underneath Edouard Manet s Le déjeuner sur l herbe. The composition of the two pictures is the same, but the style is very different. Clearly, the canvas was painted over by someone other than Manet. Edouard Manet creates a scandal in the 19th century art world with his paintings Le déjeuner sur l'herbe and Olympia. In each of them, the naked model is an eighteen-year old Parisian Victorine Meurent. Critics ridicule the works, dismissing Victorine as a common prostitute. But, in a world utterly dominated by men, she harbours a secret ambition to become an artist. Victorine works in bars and tries to teach herself to paint. Throughout her sexual encounters, she retains a ruthless obsession with her ambition. The events of 1862 and 1863 are narrated by Manet and Victorine Meurent. The aristocratic Manet and the working class Victorine share a passion for art and a longing for success. Fuelled by jealousy, sexual tensions develop between them which are reflected in the painting Olympia. Main creates the characters and the atmosphere of 1860s Paris with a compelling simplicity that renders them authentic. Victorine s bitter struggle to emerge from her background contrasts sharply with the esoteric exchanges between Manet and his friend Baudelaire on the nature of modernism.

About the Author

V R Main graduated in English and Comparative Literature and has a PhD in Elizabethan drama from the Shakespeare Institute. She has worked as a journalist for the BBC and a lecturer at Nigerian and British universities, as well as in adult and further education colleges. She has two daughters and lives in London.