The Incomplete Amorist

A painter who makes love to women as a pastime meets an eighteen-year-old vicar's stepdaughter sketching in the Kentish woods, and when she takes his idle advice to study art in Paris he finds the game harder to keep up than he expected. Nesbit is remembered for her children's books; this is one of the adult novels she wrote alongside them, and it is sharper about money than about love. Forty-seven plates, among them Henry Sargent's The Dinner Party and Thomas Couture's studio scenes, open the novel's Paris and its drawing rooms to view.