Keeping the World Away

Summary

With the wonderfully satisfying appeal of Forster's bestselling Diary of an Ordinary Woman and the historical delights of Lady's Maid , this engrossing, beautifully crafted novel follows the fictional adventures, over a hundred years, of an early 20th century painting and the women whose lives it touches. It opens with bold, passionate Gwen, born in the nineteenth century, coming of age in the twentieth, struggling to be an artist, going to Paris where she becomes Rodin's lover and paints a small, intimate picture of a quiet corner of her attic room...Then, there's Charlotte, a dreamy intellectual Edwardian girl, with artistic leanings, but less talent; and Stella, Lucasta, Ailsa, and Gillian, who share an unspoken desire to 'keep the world away', to have for themselves a tranquil golden place like that in the painting. Lost, found, stolen, strayed, sold, almost destroyed, fought over, and finally bequeathed, the picture makes its way from Paris to Hampstead, popping up on a London market stall after the Great War, finding its way to the Cornish coast, then back to London after the Second World War, eventually taking a brief trip to Scotland and returning at last to Paris at the turn of the twenty-first century...Quintessential Forster, this is a novel about women's lives, about what it means, and what it costs to be both a woman and an artist, and an unusual, compelling look at a beautiful painting (one of a series by Gwen John, not all of which survived...) and its imagined afterlife.