The Sculptress
Alexander’s latest novel follows the tradition of Madame Bovary, the psychological novel of love and betrayal by Gustav Flaubert. In The Sculptress, the heroine also chafes inside the boundaries of respectability, but she finds an outlet for her passion in her art.
Emma Lewis is still a teenager when she meets the handsome and intriguing Kurt Larsen, but with a budding artist’s knowledge of anatomy, she’s sexually curious, and one thing inevitably leads to another in their relationship. Of course, Kurt, a student in law school, has no intention of letting a fling’s pregnancy ruin his future, and he leaves her to her own devices. She has only one choice—abortion. Several years later Emma meets Tom, a kindly, staid doctor, whom she agrees to marry even though she doesn’t feel sparks when she’s with him and even though her best friend is in love with him. Then the Great War disrupts their comfortable lives, and Tom decides to take his medical expertise to the front. When Emma forsakes an opportunity for true love to join her husband in France and sculpt masks for damaged soldiers, nothing turns out as expected.
Alexander delves into Emma’s thoughts and feelings, exploring the mind of a woman who wants more for herself and is willing to do whatever is necessary to get it. The author accurately and skillfully captures the conflicting desires of this young woman while realistically depicting the artistic milieu of Boston in the early 1900s and showing us a world much more modern than we might have supposed. But the real heart and power of the story lie in the descriptions of Emma’s work making masks for wounded soldiers. Here Alexander uncovers a little-known facet of World War I, one which is sure to fascinate readers.
