A Woman With No Clothes On (2008) is V. R. Main's debut novel. Set in 19th-century Paris, it is the story of 18-year-old Victorine Meurent, the painter Edouard Manet and their shared longing for the ultimate painting. The novel won the Trafalgar Squared Prize,[2] and was shortlisted for The People's Book Prize.[3] It was published by Delancey Press.[1]
The aristocratic Manet and the working-class Victorine Meurent narrate A Woman With No Clothes On. A chance meeting between the two leads to an intense relationship of painting and sexual tension. Manet creates a scandal when he exhibits Le déjeuner sur l'herbe and Olympia in which the naked model is a young Victorine. While critics and the general public dismiss the works, and label Victorine a common prostitute, she is determined to make her mark in the art world as a painter in her own right. Her bitter struggle to succeed is punctuated by the exchanges between Manet and his friend Baudelaire on the matter of modernism.
Critical response
A Woman With No Clothes On was the winner of the Trafalgar Squared Prize for Work in Progress (2008). It was described by the chair of judges, Wendy Robertson as "outstanding. A powerful novel. The writing is original, literary, intense and well-observed".[4]
The author of Manet, Lesley Stevenson praised Main for "rescu[ing] Victorine from her invisibility in the Parisian art world of the nineteenth century".[4]
