Guest post by The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby author Ellery Lloyd
Ellery Lloyd is the pseudonym for the London-based husband and wife team of Collette Lyons and Paul Vlitos whose last novel, instant New York Times bestseller The Club, a “smart, stylish, and savage” (People Magazine), was a Reese’s Book Club pick. The former deputy editor of Grazia Middle East, content director of Elle (UK), and editorial director at Soho House, Collette studied History of Art at Trinity College, Cambridge, and has worked in Sydney, Dubai, and London. She has written for the Guardian, the Telegraph, and the Sunday Times. Paul is the author of two previous novels, Welcome to the Working Week and Every Day Is Like Sunday. He is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Greenwich. They are also the authors of People Like Her.
Our new novel, The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby, unravels the mystery of fictional painting Self Portrait as Sphinx, painted by runaway heiress artist Juliette, and a series of deaths and disappearances over the course of a century.
In 1938, Juliette Willoughby runs away to Paris, leaving her grand country house, her stifling aristocratic family, and their terrible buried secrets to be with her older, married artist lover Oskar. Joining his circle of Surrealist artists in Paris, she is inspired to paint her masterpiece, which is displayed for just one night before it is destroyed in a studio fire that also kills Juliette and Oskar.
In 1990s Cambridge, two art history students uncover evidence suggesting the blaze may not have been an accident and that the painting may still exist. In present-day Dubai, an art dealer is accused of the brutal murder of his oldest friend and the last surviving member of the Willoughby clan, immediately after selling the rediscovered Self Portrait as Sphinx for £42 million – and the secret to what links all of this may be hidden in the painting.
We read many brilliant artist biographies in our research but also came across some amazing novels which also have a woman artist at their heart. These are our favourites…
Disobedient by Elizabeth Fremantle
One of the best-known women artists, Artemisia Gentileschi, the daughter of respected artist Orazio Gentileschi, is at the heart of this biographical novel. Set in 1611 Rome, it follows her pain and struggles (including the sexual assault by and subsequent trial of her tutor Agostino Tassi) as she rails against the constraints set by a rigid and patriarchal society. A harrowing read, but one which captures her extraordinary spirit and resilience.
The Blue Hour by Paula Hawkins
The Girl on the Train author is back in September with a claustrophobic novel about art, ambition and legacy. A Scottish tidal island, accessible by causeway for only twelve hours each day, is inhabited by artist Vanessa Chapman, whose notoriously unfaithful husband disappeared after visiting her there twenty years ago. After her death, a strange discovery—a fragment of human bone in one of her sculptures—intimately connects three people from Chapman’s past, unveiling a tangled web of secrets and lies.
The Art Forger by B.A. Shapiro (2012)
Inspired by the real-life Isabella Stewart Gardner heist in which 13 major works by titans of art were stolen, Shapiro’s fictional protagonist, Claire Roth, an artist and forger, is commissioned to copy one of the works looted in the robbery. The novel leads us through the underbelly of the Boston art world, uncovering nefarious plots and intricate deceptions and questioning the fallibility of attribution and authenticity.
Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez
This incredible Reese-pick novel is directly inspired by the life of Ana Mendieta, a Havana-born, New York-based sculptor, painter, and performance artist who died in 1985 at the age of 36 after falling from an apartment window in suspicious circumstances. Gonzalez asks important questions about who gets remembered, collected, and written about, and why. Her protagonist, rising star of the art world Anita de Monte, is found dead and the tragedy is briefly the talk of the art world, until just as swiftly, it isn’t. Decades later, Raquel, a third-year art history student, stumbles upon her story, which has eerie parallels with her own life.
The Last Painting of Sara De Vos by Dominic Smith (2016)
This historical novel brings to life two periods of the past in a gripping tale of a fictional female painter in seventeenth-century Holland and the theft of her only surviving painting from a private collector in 1950s New York. When its owner commissions a young art student to forge a replacement for it, a complex plot unfurls over decades and time zones in a meditation on the relationship between art and authenticity.
