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Summary
Summary
New York Times bestselling author Sena Jeter Naslund explores the artistic processes and lives of creative women in her groundbreaking literary opus The Fountain of St. James Court; or Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman.
Sena Jeter Naslund's inspiring novel-within-a-novel depicts the lives of both a fictional contemporary writer and a historic painter whose works now hang in the great museums of Europe and America.
The story opens at midnight beside a beautifully illumined fountain of Venus Rising from the Sea. Kathryn Callaghan has just finished her novel about painter Élisabeth Vigée-LeBrun, a survivor of the French Revolution hated for her sympathetic portraits of Marie Antoinette. Though still haunted by the story she has written, Kathryn must leave the eighteenth-century European world she has researched and made vivid in order to return to her own life as an American in 2012.
Naslund's spellbinding new novel presents the reader with an alternate version of The Artist: a woman of age who has created for herself, against enormous odds, a fulfilling life of thoroughly realized achievement.
Author Notes
Sena Jeter Naslund was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1942. She received a Bachelor's degree from Birmingham Southern College, where she received the B.B. Comer Medal in English, and a Master's degree and a doctorate from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. She has taught at the University of Louisville, the University of Montana, Indiana University (Bloomington), Vermont College, and the University of Montevallo. She has written several books including The Disobedience of Water, Ahab's Wife, Four Spirits, Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette, and Adam and Eve. She has won numerous awards including the Harper Lee Award, the Hall-Waters Southern Prize, the Southeastern Library Association Award, and the Alabama Library Association Award.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Kirkus Review
Despite a subtitle that clearly refers to James Joyce, Virginia Woolf echoes far louder in this novel within a novel following one day in the life of a 60-ish author of a fictional biography about the 18th-century portraitist of Marie Antoinette. In contemporary Louisville, Ky., thrice divorced Kathryn Callaghan walks her newly completed manuscript over to Leslie, a musician and fellow writer with whom she's been best friends since they grew up in Montgomery, Ala. African-American Leslie's mother participated in the bus boycott. Leslie has recently moved to Louisville, and soon, Kathryn introduces her to another dear friend Daisy. Walking with her husband, Daisy feels a sense of danger when she notices a car drive by. Kathryn goes home and thinks about her beloved gay son, Humphrey, now living abroad, safe from his dangerous former lover. In the morning, Kathryn takes a walk with Humphrey's father, Peter, her second husband. She thinks some more about her life, connecting deep emotions to literary references. She spends her day partially preparing for a possible visit from a potential new love interest, talking with her friends and contemplating her life in literary terms. Meanwhile, Leslie, along with the reader, is reading Kathryn's first-person novel about Elisabeth Vige Le Brun, a fiction also heavily invested in analyzing what it is to be an artist. Kathryn's somewhat stiff prose describes Elisabeth's early childhood as an artistic prodigy, her difficulties after her father's death, her unhappy marriage, her fortuitous meeting with Marie Antoinette, whom she defends as misunderstood, not unlike Naslund in her 2006 historical novel Abundance. Like Kathryn, Elisabeth's love life never mattered as much as her art. But while Elisabeth and her only daughter became estranged before the daughter's untimely death, Kathryn proves herself willing to go to any lengths to protect her perfect son. Leslie's compliment that Kathryn's work is "lined with silken sentences" holds true for Naslund (Adam and Eve, 2010). Nevertheless, the tone of literary high-mindedness and self-importance grows wearing after a while.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
In a lively and pointed variation on James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, popular and conceptually adventurous Naslund (Adam & Eve, 2010) portrays two women artists in a novel-within-a-novel. Successful writer Kathryn Callaghan lives in present-day Louisville, Kentucky, in a lovely, old neighborhood surrounding a fountain depicting Venus Rising from the Sea, a graceful embodiment of the novel's inquiry into the obstacles confronting women artists. Battered by her third divorce yet buoyed by her neighbors and friends, Kathryn completes a novel about the brilliant and resolute French painter Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun (1755-1842). After surviving childhood loss and a disastrous marriage to become a renowned portraitist, Elisabeth is forced into exile for her friendship with Marie Antoinette (the subject of Nasland's novel, Abundance, 2006). It's a challenge to match the powerfully rendered drama of Elisabeth's historic struggles with Kathryn's subtler suffering, and Naslund who has Kathryn admire Virginia Woolf while striving to write accessible fiction veers into contrivance and sentimentality. Still, this is an incisive and keenly pleasurable novel about women artists overcoming adversity to create joyful work that celebrates life's beauty and wonder.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
Library Journal Review
A novel within a novel-hmm. Writer Kathryn "Ryn" Callaghan, age 70 and now thrice divorced, has given the manuscript of her latest work to friend Leslie to read. The novel depicts the life of French artist Elisabeth Vigee-Le Brun, who narrates her life from rags to riches as she becomes portraitist of Queen Marie Antoinette, then flees France because of the Revolution. (Vigee-Le Brun is also a character in Naslund's novel Abundance.) There's the making of pathos and much excitement here, but Elisabeth relates her story in a monotone that keeps her life from coming alive and would have made for rather tedious reading had it been book length. Meanwhile, Ryn spends her time ruminating over her past and her three failed marriages (and she's not the only character in The Fountain who's married abusive or otherwise unsuitable men). The only drama in Ryn's life is the return of her son's ex-lover Jerry, who is truly menacing. Fortunately for Ryn and son Humphrey, Jerry is married and living in Sweden with his hubby. VERDICT Ryn's fears for her son and her confrontation with Jerry as Humphrey is about to return home might make for a catchy short story. But as a full-length book, this doesn't really work. [See Prepub Alert, 3/4/13.]-Edward Cone, New York (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| I Midnight: Crossing the Court | p. 1 |
| II Morning Murmurs | p. 35 |
| III Rites of Autumn | p. 101 |
| IV Midday: Old Louisville | p. 171 |
| V In the French Manner | p. 219 |
| VI A Cello in the Afternoon | p. 247 |
| VII The Art of Living | p. 263 |
| VIII A Cello in the Afternoon (continued) | p. 287 |
| IX Vignettes | p. 309 |
| X Louveciennes; or, An Old Woman Among Spring Trees | p. 333 |
| XI Vignettes: Italy (continued) | p. 359 |
| XII Nightfall | p. 375 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 433 |
