Susan Vreeland

After chronicling the life of Renaissance artist Artemisia Gentileschi in her last book, Susan Vreeland continues her welcome biographical specialty in underappreciated women artists in her new novel, Forest Lover. This time around, her subject is turn-of-the-century painter Emily Carr, who defied her strict Victorian family to live among the Indians of then-isolated Vancouver Island. Her work, which centered on scenes of nature and Indian life, would eventually draw comparisons to Georgia O’Keeffe and Frida Kahlo in the salons of Paris. In the isolation of the woodlands, she finds something that speaks to her soul. But she still needs somebody to buy her paintings, and she finds herself reluctantly becoming a champion of Indian culture to the bourgeoisie she scorns. It’s a moving portrait of a woman who couldn’t fit into the strictures of the society she was born into—deftly represented in visual metaphor in one early scene by five Douglas firs, four tall and straight and one with twisting and wild branches seeming to reach out yearningly to find unknown soil.

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