Evelyn is an extraordinary product of a childhood tyrannized by her emotionally frigid and abusive mother, whose life centres on her pretentiously formal weekly bridge games and her banner-bearing role in the local Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire, even though her ancestors fought on the side of the American Revolution against England.
Enraptured by a deep affinity for the arts, the young Evelyn is determined to escape her oppressive and dysfunctional family in the Town of Mount Royal near Montreal through her work in the fashion industry. Feeling trapped in the stifling confines of her petit bourgeois 1940s existence, she runs away to New York just before Pearl Harbor, destined to become a rich and famous fashion illustrator in the United States and France. There, in Central Park, she falls helplessly in love with René, a talented and tormented painter who is both constantly seeking and rejecting recognition and success.
Having been raised on the traditional virtues of prudishness and saintly images of a poor family from the French-Canadian working-class district of St-Henri in Montreal, René could not possibly be more foreign to the society darling that Evelyn has become.
A novel about art and passion, The Painter’s Wife takes us on a journey through Paris, London, Provence and Ireland; through New York, Toronto, San Francisco and along the luminous shores of the St. Lawrence River. Inspired by the lives of two great artists who are as yet relatively unknown in Canada—Evelyn Rowat and René Marcil—The Painter’s Wife is written in a language as brilliant and intense as the mercurial lives of its completely contradictory characters.
About the author
Born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Sheila Fischman was raised in Ontario and is a graduate of the University of Toronto. She is a founding member of the Literary Translators’ Association of Canada and has also been a columnist for the Globe and Mail and Montreal Gazette, a broadcaster with CBCRadio, and literary editor of the Montreal Star. She now devotes herself full time to literary translation, specializing in contemporary Québec fiction, and has translated more than 125 Québec novels by, among others, Michel Tremblay, Jacques Poulin, Anne Hébert, François Gravel, Marie-Claire Blais, and Roch Carrier. Sheila Fischman has received numerous honours, including the 1998 Governor General’s Award (for her translation of Michel Tremblay’s Bambi and Me for Talonbooks); she has been a finalist fourteen times for this award. She has received two Canada Council Translation Prizes and two Félix-Antoine Savard Awards from Columbia University. In 2000, she was invested into the Order of Canada and, in 2008, into the Ordre national du Québec, and, in 2008, she received the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize for her outstanding contributions to Canadian literature. She holds honorary doctorates from the Universities of Ottawa and Waterloo. Fischman currently resides in Montréal.
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