Camille Laurens

Translated by Willard Wood

Published 7 July 2020

Longlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2021

She is famous throughout the world, but how many know her name? You can admire her figure in Washington, Paris, London, New York, Dresden, or Copenhagen, but where is her grave? She was fourteen in the Paris of the 1880s, eking out a living at the Paris Opera as a petit rat. She also worked as a model, posing for painters and sculptors—among them Edgar Degas.

Laurens paints a compelling portrait of Marie van Goethem and the world she inhabited; a time when art unsettled the hypocrisy of society. Her passionate inquiry takes us through the underbelly of the Belle Époque, casting a light on those who have traditionally been overlooked in the study of art, and opening a space for essential questions.

‘Sensitive, human, and profound.’ — Catherine Hewitt, author of Renoir’s Dancer: The Secret Life of Suzanne Valadon

‘It’s a wonderful book, a little jewel, the way the author tries––discreetly, with respect and even a bit of shyness––to approach the dancer and through her the vices of representation, the injustice of the transformation of an individual into a figure, is quite beautiful, and touches on what for me is one of the most significant problems for fiction: how we try to understand someone else while honoring that inner secrecy they will always possess and we never will be able to grasp––the paradox, you know, of how we never understand and yet are condemned to understanding, however far our way of understanding is from approximating the real inner nature of the people we contemplate.’ — Adrian Nathan West, author of My Father’s Diet

175 pages
paperback, 210 x 130 mm
isbn 978-1-9993318-7-0

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