Artists’ Wives

Helen Marx Books and Turtle Point Press have rediscovered a little known collection of short stories by the once celebrated author of Le Petit Chose and Lettres de Mon Moulin. The release of these observant and empathic stories written at the end of the nineteenth century coincides with the recent release of Ruth Butler’s book from Yale University Press entitled Hidden in the Shadow of the Master: The Model-Wives of Cezanne, Monet and Rodin. Daudet is master of understated humor and he has an unerring eye for the competition between husband and wife. Fragility and faithfulness, fame and gossip take on whole new meanings in stories which at times are written in parallel texts and have an almost postmodern feel to their highly original presentation.