It's not every novel that's conceived in high school—least of all a tale of the High Renaissance, full of art and politics—but such was the case of The Passion of Artemisia, the new novel by Susan Vreeland that was just published by Viking. One day in 1998, as the author passed through the art history classroom of the California school were she worked as an English teacher, a colleague called out to her, saying: "I know who your next novel will be about—Artemisia Gentileschi."
Artemisia who? was Vreeland's first thought, but her fellow teacher quickly filled in the blanks. "She just told me a few facts," Vreeland says, "that Artemisia's father was a painter, that she had been raped and that during her trial she was tortured with finger cords in an attempt to cripple her fingers and destroy her ability to paint."
Needless to say, Vreeland was hooked. And, as she did to such effect in her bestselling earlier work, The Girl in Hyacinth Blue, which traced the ownership of a lost Vermeer painting from its creation in 17th-century Holland to the present, she wasted little time in turning this art-centered tale into words.
"Fiction fills in where history leaves off," the author tells PW from her orderly home office, which overlooks palm trees and a sun- and flower-filled patio. Home is a San Diego condominium, just a few miles from the ocean, which she shares with her husband, Joseph "Kip" Gray, a software engineer and systems analyst. "I'm very much interested in the process by which a historical figure becomes a fictional character. Fiction is the process by which our time grasps the significance of a life in another time period."
Vreeland is a slender, animated woman who must be in her 60s, but looks far younger than her age. She's a natural teacher who's known for lively bookstore appearances in which she sets out to both educate and entertain—a real classroom act. She came to fiction via freelance journalism, which she began 20 years ago, an adjunct to her teaching career; later, she honed her fiction writing at conferences and at a local writers' workshop, which she still attends.
Her passion for writing about artists came about unexpectedly, by way of cancer. Diagnosed in the mid-'90s with lymphoma, and very, very ill, she spent much of her hospital time perusing art books because, as she says, "they gave me peace and joy and meditation." That experience led her, after her remission in 1997, to writing art-related stories, including a novella about Artemisia. "It seems like sourbread dough, the cultivator for something," Vreeland says of this as-yet-unpublished collection. "There were a couple of stories there that could very well blossom into novels."
Two stories that did flower were on Vermeer, an artist Vreeland loves for the tranquil, unhurried nature of his work. In 1998, she decided to expand these pieces into a whole book of stories on Vermeer. After one of her earlier pieces on him was accepted for publication by the Missouri Review, that publication's fiction editor, Greg Michaelson, who held the same title at the small Colorado publishing house of McMurray & Beck, asked to see the others.
The result was The Girl in Hyacinth Blue, which Vreeland's agent, Barbara Braun, sold to McMurray & Beck as a novel in 1998. Advance reviews were good, and, within weeks of the book's 1999 publication, the paperback rights were auctioned to Viking for $50,000—10 times the purchase price for the hardcover edition. "I felt catapulted into a new life," the author says, recalling that early sale. And so was her book, which to date has sold 60,000 copies in hardback, 300,000 in paper.
When Viking editor Jane VanMehren asked her new author what else she was working on, Vreeland showed her an early version of The Passion of Artemisia, as well as her as-yet-untitled story collection. The result was a two-book deal, with the publisher buying both works for $250,000. The initial print run for Artemisia is 90,000. Foreign rights have been sold in several countries and it's Book Sense's number one pick for January and February.
The author researched her subject by reading histories, studying the records of the trial of Artemisia's assailant (who happened to be her artist father's collaborator) and, finally, by walking the streets of Florence and Rome. "I just walked where she walked, smelled the smells of the river, noticed the quality of light." Vreeland is the first to admit that the Renaissance itself, and not just this one painter's life, was a revelation. "I didn't know much about Italian art beyond Raphael and Michelangelo."
Artemisia's story has attracted others, too, including the French writer Alexandra Lapierre, whose book Artemisia was marketed as a biography in France, but is being sold as a novel in the United States. "When I saw that book at BEA my heart fell," Vreeland admits. But soon her natural optimism returned. She's heartened by the fact that sales of The Girl in Hyacinth Blue actually seemed to increase after another book on Vermeer—Tracy Chevalier's The Girl with the Pearl Earring—came onto the market. "The books had a positive effect on each other," Vreeland reports, adding that she and Chevalier have since become friends. In the case of Artemisia, the two books are substantially different, the author adds. "Mine is much more a work of the imagination," she says. "Mine is my Artemisia...."
