Author | V. R. Main |
---|---|
Language | English |
Genre | Historical fiction |
Published | London: Delancey, 2008 [1] |
Publication place | France |
Pages | 335 |
ISBN | 9780953911974 |
OCLC | 280369069 |
A Woman With No Clothes On (2008) is V. R. Main's debut novel. Set in 19th-century Paris, it is the story of 18-year-old Victorine Meurent, the painter Edouard Manet and their shared longing for the ultimate painting. The novel won the Trafalgar Squared Prize, [2] and was shortlisted for The People's Book Prize. [3] It was published by Delancey Press. [1]
The aristocratic Manet and the working-class Victorine Meurent narrate A Woman With No Clothes On. A chance meeting between the two leads to an intense relationship of painting and sexual tension. Manet creates a scandal when he exhibits Le déjeuner sur l'herbe and Olympia in which the naked model is a young Victorine. While critics and the general public dismiss the works, and label Victorine a common prostitute, she is determined to make her mark in the art world as a painter in her own right. Her bitter struggle to succeed is punctuated by the exchanges between Manet and his friend Baudelaire on the matter of modernism.
A Woman With No Clothes On was the winner of the Trafalgar Squared Prize for Work in Progress (2008). It was described by the chair of judges, Wendy Robertson as "outstanding. A powerful novel. The writing is original, literary, intense and well-observed". [4]
The author of Manet, Lesley Stevenson praised Main for "rescu[ing] Victorine from her invisibility in the Parisian art world of the nineteenth century". [4]
The novel received press attention in The Guardian [5] and The Times.[ citation needed] The Socialist Worker carried an article on the novel's attention to issues of gender and social class, [6] as well as on the feminist blog The F-Word. [7]