A Corner of One's Own

A haunting painting's effect on several generations of women.

KEEPING THE WORLD AWAY

By Margaret Forster

Ballantine. 312 pp. $24.95

Last month just before the awarding of Britain's Orange Broadband Prize for the best novel by a woman, novelist Joanna Kavenna published an essay in the London Times objecting to the special needlepointed category that women writers find themselves in. Why, she asks, at this late date are books by female authors still being "dismissed as 'women's interest' "?

I know what you're thinking: "Calm down, Joanna. You're getting hysterical," but the data bear her out. She refers to a pair of scholars at London University who have observed a persistent bias in readers' preferences: "While women read books by both genders . . . men simply don't read books by women." We all know this, of course, but it was confirmed for me again a few weeks ago when a couple of friends spotted me on the Metro reading Keeping the World Away, a new novel from the bestselling author of Lady's Maid. They couldn't resist making cracks about my imperiled manhood. The fact that I was carrying my lunch in a J. Jill bag didn't help.

Is it wussy to read a novel by a woman?

Is there such a thing as "women's writing"?

These are complicated and practical questions for us at Book World. They come into play as we select books and reviewers, trying to deal with demographic realities without falling into sexist stereotypes. We recently received a sharp letter from a reader who objected to the way we had labeled a roundup of comic novels by young women: "Chick Lit." Book World editor Marie Arana responded by confessing some unease with the term, but pointing out that publishers use this label to reach their target audience.

All labels seem to cut both ways. Kavenna concludes her essay by looking forward to a day when "the epithet 'women writers' can be discarded altogether, and there will just be 'writers.' " But I worry that something valuable might be lost in that process. Let's take the case of Keeping the World Away, an insightful novel about women and the way women artists have been circumscribed by a patriarchal society. It's a feminist novel -- not incidentally, but directly -- and if that term, along with "women writers," has been effectively disparaged through condescension or timidity, it's time to redeem it rather than curtsy and withdraw.

Keeping the World Away will remind you of two other works you probably enjoyed. The first is Susan Vreeland's Girl in Hyacinth Blue, a lovely novel that traces the ownership of a Vermeer painting from the present day back to the artist's 17th-century home. The other is Virginia's Woolf's "A Room of One's Own," an essay that imagines William Shakespeare's brilliant (and unknown) sister, Judith, and describes the way poverty and prejudice have long denied women the opportunity and the space to write. Forster combines these two themes to produce an exceptionally thoughtful novel based on a painting called "A Corner of the Artist's Room in Paris," by Gwen John (1876-1939). Distinct but interrelated chapters describe each owner of an early draft of this painting, starting with the longest chapter, which describes John's adolescence in England, her eventual move to Paris and her passionate affair with the sculptor Auguste Rodin.

Most readers are unlikely to know much of anything about John's life; until recently the work of her brother, Augustus, was far better known. Forster's sympathetic portrayal is revealing on several levels. She describes a precocious artist possessed of a spirit completely at odds with her detached demeanor: "Her mind raced with millions of violent and spectacular thoughts and ideas," Forster writes, "and in the center of herself she stored a passion which might terrify people if they suspected it." Torn by desire and artistic ambition, she craves one thing above all else: "her own tiny room," the relief of being isolated, "this sense of containment, of calm."

For a time, her affair with Rodin obliterates any interest in art, but when he begins to ignore her, she starts painting the empty corner of her room, a placid scene that, ironically, stems from a violently conflicted set of desires. "It is me," John tells a friend. But it's also "a representation of how Rodin wanted her to be," and even at times how she wants herself to be: a picture of "contentment, peace, a life lived sweetly and quietly. No mess, no trouble, no agonizing," as striking for its emptiness as its presence. Her work on this subtle painting becomes a kind of therapy to avoid becoming "the madwoman in the attic," that tragic motif that feminist scholars Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar traced through the work of great 19th-century writers.

Forster turns this hauntingly conflicted vision over in each of the subsequent five chapters. By gift, theft, inheritance or serendipity, "A Corner of the Artist's Room in Paris" moves from one woman to the next, right up to the present day. Each of these stories is exquisitely drawn, whether it's about a wealthy young girl who realizes her artistic talent is insufficient, the daughter of a poor potter who becomes a successful portrait painter, or the widow of an adulterer who must go through the motions of grief to satisfy her friends and family. Like the painting itself, these chapters are deceptively still, but infused with deep tension as these women struggle to arrange a physical and mental space in which they can feel at peace.

If there's a problem with the novel, it's that it risks a kind of essentialism. The men never get it. (You know how they are!) Invariably, they wonder "why the artist had bothered to paint the rather dreary corner of a room. There was nothing happening, no drama or bright colors." But despite the varied characters and settings, each of these women comes to some close variation of the same response to John's painting and her own life: "It was surely a picture of sadness, a gentle wistfulness, the reflection of an aching heart." This poignancy endures a heavy burden of redundancy as the novel moves on and repeats it again and again.

The publisher inadvertently signals a related problem in a note sent to reviewers: "Forster's new book is also a historical, but a decidedly twentieth century, novel." How true. Eight years into the 21st century, Keeping the World Away somehow seems closer to Edith Wharton's House of Mirth (1905) or Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), feminist novels that hammered away at a society still largely deaf to the needs of brilliant, artistic women. In the 1960s, Forster's story would have seemed radical, the repetition of her theme so necessary. Today, I'm not so sure. But maybe I'm being naive. Perhaps Judith Shakespeare is still waiting for a room of her own. ·

Ron Charles is a senior editor of Book World.