In October 1928, Virginia Woolf, delivering a lecture to two women’s colleges at Cambridge, famously outlined some prerequisites for a woman to write fiction: she “must have money and a room of her own”. In Lucy Steeds’s debut novel The Artist, we are once again reminded that the successful exercise of substantial talent often rests on the crude but incontrovertible contingencies of having both the means and the time to achieve.
In 1920, Joseph Adelaide, a journalist from London, arrives in Provence to write a profile of the celebrated and reclusive painter Edouard Tartuffe. Adelaide was a conscientious objector of the Great War and, in a strangled form of survivor’s guilt, has left art school in disgrace.
In Tartuffe, he sees a possibility of redemption, an opportunity to uncover the processes of a genius, but when he meets the man himself Adelaide finds a tortured artist whose immense talent is matched only by his infantile neediness. Tartuffe is reliant on his orphaned and obedient niece Ettie, and at times he is vicious in his helplessness. “This,” Adelaide reassures himself, “is what we must endure”; perhaps pain is the price of proximity to greatness and cruelty and carelessness the natural cost of art.
But, as Ettie notes, “he is not looking properly”. She is, secretly, as capable as her uncle. Her frustrated talent and fugitive ambitions unnerve Tartuffe who works to keep her in a state of subservience (his name, incidentally, recalls the titular hypocrite of Molière’s play). Steeds is at her best when she probes the psychological effects of this enforced inferiority and at her most fluent when she describes Ettie’s flights of fancy and freedom, her yearning for the blue expanse of sky and the space to be her own “bright, blazing self”.
As if to vindicate her protagonist’s hopes, Steeds’s writing is committed to sensation. She describes tables heaving with glistening oysters and fruit overripening to rottenness, a “frothing” canvas of red and white, a blur of merging bodies in the river, and a portrait “like sunlight on water”. In this urgent flurry of impression and feeling, Steeds anticipates a happier, more hopeful vision of what an artist can do.
