Angelica, Paintress of Minds

By Miranda Miller

Category: All Books, Fiction, Historical, Women's, World Literature

Formats available: Paperback, Ebook

Pages: 280

Publication date: 13/08/20

ISBN-13: 9781909954410

ISBN-10: 1909954411

Angelica Kaufman is so successful that when she comes to England as a young woman in 1766 a word is coined: Angelicamad.

‘Miller’s intricate fictions are lit by the dark flicker of a strong and original imagination.’ – Hilary Mantel

This sparky, true life novel tells the life story of a woman who battled misogyny to become one of the greatest artists of the Enlightenment Period. After fifteen triumphant years in London, she flees to Italy following the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots.In Rome, as an old lady, a lively young artist and model names Lucia is Angelica’s guest. And she’s pregnant, ridded with the scandal Angelica has been trying to avoid all her life.

She is the girl I trained myself not to be.

Men can do as they like, but women risk losing everything. In her studio, Angelica relives her journey from a poor background to international fame. She paints her friends (Antonio Canova, Germaine de Stael, Emma Hamilton and Goethe among others) and draws us into her fascinating past. Angelica, Paintress of Minds tells of a gifted and powerful woman with a kind heart.

This is a novel about a gifted and powerful woman with a kind heart.  Like us, she lives at a time of bewildering change and fears the unknown future.

Hilary Mantel: ‘“Miller’s intricate fictions are lit by the dark flicker of a strong and original imagination.”

“A richly imagined and authoritative portrait of a fascinating and important painter, and a woman who was one of the most famous people of her era. Miller explores Angelica’s vivid and conflicted inner life with panache and passion.”— Jean McNeil, author of The Ice Diaries

Reviews

Wonderfully rich material and north London-based novelist Miranda Miller has made a swashbucking drama out of it in what she calls a "fictionalised autobiography". There are some great set pieces when Miranda Miller brings together Angelica's experiences and some of the civic, military and social "events" of her time.

- Piers Plowright - Camden Journal

The novel is beautifully written, with phrases like the young Angelica thinking “titles make a special shape in the air when people speak them, high and arched”. Kauffmann is presented as hard-working, loyal, kind, sometimes susceptible but more determined than she thinks she is. She had to be, for hers was a man’s world. Her artistic talent was only permitted to grow in the first place because her father eventually enabled it.

- Katherine Mezzacappa, in the Review of the Historical Novel Society

Miranda Miller’s novel, a first-person account of the life of the 18th-century Swiss neoclassical painter Angelica Kauffman, faithfully reflects the career of the somewhat overlooked founding member of the Royal Academy… A fascinating life and a fine painter in what’s a story well told by Miller.

- Paul Simon - Morning Star

Miranda Miller

‘Miller’s intricate fictions are lit by the dark flicker of a strong and original imagination.’ – Hilary Mantel London-based Miranda Miller has written eight novels, a volume of short stories about expat life in Saudi Arabia, and a book of interviews with homeless women and politicians. She was Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the Courtauld Institute from 2013-15.  Her Bedlam duology, two self-contained novels linked by the themes of artists and madness, was published by Peter Owen. The Royal Academy Magazine chose her novel The Fairy Visions of Richard Dadd …

Related News & Articles

Angelica Kauffman in the Spotlight in 2024

Who was Angelica Kauffman? As her life and work is set to be featured in two major exhibitions this year at the Royal Academy and Tate Britain, Miranda Miller provides a backdrop to this ‘paintress of minds’ at the centre of her 2020 novel.   This is the cover of …

Miranda Miller on how she discovered Angelica Kauffmann

Angelica, Paintress of Minds is out in the USA and CA now! It’s still available in the UK of course. Here, Miranda Miller tells us how she delved into the heart of Angelica Kauffmann by visiting important places in the painter’s life. Writing fiction about a real person is a …