A studio of one's own: fictional women painters and the art of fiction

This book traces the portrayal of women artists in nineteenth-and twentieth-century novels in English, including women writers of England, the United States, Ireland, and Canada. It interprets the implied dialogues of the authors with the painters depicted in their novels in order to discover the writers' views of women's creativity in both its aesthetic and feminist dimensions. In particular, it develops a theoretical idea of women's art as liminal and unfinished, positive terms that describe certain remarkable continuities in the ways in which women writers depict their sister artists. The chapter on Virginia Woolf is pivotal because Woolf presents in Lily Briscoe a self-aware, theorizing woman painter. Later writers reveal the pervasive influence of Woolf's portrait of the artist, while giving unique twists and turns to the aesthetic and political questions that Woolf raises.