Fiction with Anna Creer.
A Man of Genius. By Janet Todd. Bitter Lemon Press. $32.99.
Professor Janet Todd is best known for her scholarly books on women writers. A Man of Genius, set in Regency England, features a heroine who makes a living writing gothic novels. Ann St Clair is a woman of independent means who falls in love with a "man of genius", Robert James, who dazzles his followers with his ideas on philosophy, art and politics. However, James finds London stultifying and he and Ann relocate to Venice. But winter weather and poverty destroy both love and creativity leading to tragic consequences. Ann's journey of self-discovery uncovers uncomfortable truths about both her past and that of the "man of genius".
Let Me Tell You About a Man I Knew. By Susan Fletcher. Virago. $32.99.
The idea for this novel came from one of Van Gogh's letters to his brother while at the St Paul de Mausole hospital near Saint-Remy in 1889. Van Gogh described Jeanne Trabuc, the wife of the warden, as "a woman whose looks have faded, a poor soul, resigned to her fate". Fletcher vividly reimagines Jeanne's life in Arles and Saint-Remy and why, by 1889, she is trapped in a stale marriage and a seemingly meaningless existence. Van Gogh and his art mesmerise Jeanne and, breaking her husband's rules about contact with the patients, she watches him paint. The experience will change her life.
The Crime Writer. By Jill Dawson. Sceptre. $29.99.
Jill Dawson is known for novels that feature famous people. In The Crime Writer it's Patricia Highsmith. Dawson takes a real episode in Highsmith's life in 1964, when she briefly lived in the English county of Suffolk, paranoid, in hiding from a stalker, trying to finish a novel and in love with Sam, a married woman. When Sam comes to visit, pursued by her husband, the result is murder, or is it all part of Highsmith's fertile imagination? The Crime Writer is as complex and perplexing as Highsmith's own novels as Dawson uses biographical facts and elements of Highsmith's plotlines to create a tense psychological thriller.
