The Coast of Bohemia

A county fair in Ohio opens the book, in the Fine Arts Department, where a painter named Ludlow picks up a torn scrap of a drawing the judges passed over and its teenage author has just destroyed in temper. He tells her mother frankly what an art career costs a woman, then leaves his card and the name of a New York school anyway. Years later Cornelia Saunders takes him up on it. Howells sets her among the students of the Synthesis of Art Studies and pairs her with Charmian Maybough, a rich girl who furnishes a studio and plays at being bohemian while Cornelia does the actual work. What follows is less a romance than a sober measuring of talent against temperament, and of small-town respectability against the art world’s idea of freedom.