My First Read For 2009~A Review of With Violets

A few days ago I received a much awaited copy of With Violets by Elizabeth Robards to read and review. The timing was perfect as I had just decided I would try to read more this year, even with my failing eyesight so I began reading it the same evening.

With Violets is a fiction novel with an historic background. It is the story if impressionist painter, Berthe Morisot, set in late 1800's Paris which was a time of political and military unrest for the French capital and cultural center. While the novel focuses on the romantic relationship between the unmarried Morisot and the married Édouard Manet, a master painter in his own right, it is also filled with images of the privileged society to which the two belonged. The readers are given very real characters with a riveting, if frustrating, story.

It is also the story of a strong minded woman who, in many ways, was ahead of her time. She was the lone female in the group of artists who later came to be known as the Impressionists, who broke away from the established Salon de Paris which was the sanctioned yearly art exhibit of the Académie des beaux-arts. This is exactly the kind of novel I enjoy reading, about strong female characters that follow the beat of their own drummer, not that of the public's perception of who or what they should follow. I'd actually like to see this made into a movie. It is full of visual descriptions that I would love to see on the big screen. Imagine watching Paris burning and Manet painting and a room full of the Masters (Cézanne, Degas, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, and Morisot).

I've long been a lover of Impressionist paintings and have seen the work of Morisot and of the other painters listed above so to read this novel was a treat. To me, I think this novel has something for everyone. Because it is about real people, the writer tried to stay as close to the facts as possible while also staying within the confines of the time period and its dictates. Some may be disappointed when the story doesn't go the way they want it to but while it gives us many details (imagined, as there is no proof of much of the story of the affair between the two) it also leaves much to the imagination.

One thing I did not enjoy? Having to make my way through errors in spelling, tense, and punctuation. I found more than a handful of quotations that were either opened and not closed or not opened but closed. There were quite a few sentences that had changes in tense that just did not make sense. There were instances of wrong words inserted (such as "may" instead of "my"), which I am sure were typographical errors but there were too many. If and when I publish anything, I would hope that the publisher (Avon/HarperCollins) could get it hard work correct. There really is no excuse for this many typographical errors.

Something I would have liked to see in this edition is some background on Impressionist painting and on the very academic constraints artists were held to in the 1800's. This could have easily been done in the "Author Insights, Extras, & More" section at the end of the novel. It would have added a lot to the novel.

Generally though, I do recommend this book to anyone who enjoys historical fiction, romantic fiction, period fiction, and stories around art and artists.