Lydia Cassat Reading The Morning Paper:a Novel

Description

Harriet Scott Chessman takes us into the world of Mary Cassatt's early Impressionist paintings through Mary's sister Lydia, whom the author sees as Cassatt’s most inspiring muse. Chessman hauntingly brings to life Paris in 1880, with its thriving art world. The novel’s subtle power rises out of a sustained inquiry into art’s relation to the ragged world of desire and mortality. Ill with Bright’s disease and conscious of her approaching death, Lydia contemplates her world narrowing. With the rising emotional tension between the loving sisters, between one who sees and one who is seen, Lydia asks moving questions about love and art’s capacity to remember. Chessman illuminates Cassatt’s brilliant paintings and creates a compelling portrait of the brave and memorable model who inhabits them with such grace. Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper includes five full-color plates, the entire group of paintings Mary Cassatt made of her sister.

About the Author

Harriet Scott Chessman is happy to announce the upcoming publication of her newest novel, The Lost Sketchbook of Edgar Degas (March 2017, Outpost 19), about Degas' five-month sojourn with his American cousins in New Orleans.Chessman's acclaimed novels include The Beauty of Ordinary Things, Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper, Someone Not Really Her Mother, and Ohio Angels. Her fiction has been translated into eight languages, and featured in The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, NPR’s All Things Considered, and Good Morning America.Chessman has taught English and American literature and creative writing at Yale University, Bread Loaf School of English, and Stanford University's Continuing Studies Program.She is working on new short stories, to go into a story collection, to be titled "Halliday's Treasures" (the name of her story published in the Spring 2016 issue of Catamaran). She is also developing her libretto for MY LAI into a song / poem cycle. She lives now on the Shoreline of Connecticut, after twelve years in Palo Alto, California.