A Woman With No Clothes On

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.

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]

The novel received press attention in The Guardian^[5] and The Times.^{[citation needed]} The Socialist Worker carried an article on the novel's attention to issues of gender and social class,^[6] as well as on the feminist blog The F-Word.^[7]

• Official website
• "The Naked Truth" Guardian article by V. R. Main
• "A Woman With No Clothes" Times Literary Supplement article by Michael Eaude
• Rewriting the history of Manet's favourite model Socialist Worker article by Matthew Cookson
• Feminist views of Meurent The F-Word