Letters to Gwen John

Paul interweaves John's biography ... with accounts of her own life and lyrical readings of John's paintings ... summoning a version of the artist at her most imaginative and prolific. * Times Literary Supplement * At once diary and confessional, biography and autobiography and something between the two... This book lets the reader into a world of sadness, loneliness and isolation. At its heart, however, is that unexpected kernel of confidence and self-belief that the author shared with Gwen John. -- Honor Clerk * Spectator * Powerfully honest... Her voice is deceptively plain and her insights about her own art, as well as the choices she had to make as a woman, are both illuminating and full of courage... a beautiful book. * Daily Mail * It is really Paul who's centre stage, and she is fascinating; I do not feel, at this point, that I could ever tire of her mind, and the unlikely, singular way it turns. -- Rachel Cooke * Observer * An excellent new book. . . . In a nod to the epistolary novel, she addresses her letters to 'Dear Gwen.' It's a risky conceit, but as the intimacy grows - if not with John, then certainly with us - their clarity on the grammars of gender is compelling, and utterly contemporary. Truthfulness does not run one way, any more than power and vulnerability do. -- Drusilla Modjeska * New York Times Book Review *