Blue Woman

Blue Woman is the fictional life of Rose Hartwood, an eminent 20th century artist. This beautiful novel charts the ebbs and flows of her personal and professional lives with great subtlety and sensitivity. We follow Rose the artist, her rise from a bombed out house in wartime London to something close to fame in the late sixties. Then as her fame fades, she retreats to her rural hometown in Wales, where she continues to work and has an affair with a young artist twenty years her junior. Finally there is a third act, when others, her son, her lover, the trust founded in her name, gradually take on her legacy. We also follow Rose the woman: forced to give a child up for adoption as a teenager, then a marriage that is increasingly at odds with the freedom she needs, after which she must face the question all artists must ask themselves: how to come to terms with one's own life and work? Blue Woman gradually reveals both artist and woman in their intertwined complexity: joy, struggle, determination, achievement, regret, the inheritances of love and the consolations of beauty.