This Fleshly Dress
A Collection of Stories
by Helen Kitson
At the heart of this collection is a sequence of stories based on the lives of models who sat for some of the world’s most iconic representations of women, such as Rossetti’s muse and lover Elizabeth Siddal, and Victorine Meurent who sat for Manet’s Olympia. I’ve looked at pictures of these women hundreds of times but, as I’ve got older and become more sensitive to feminist issues, I find myself wondering what these women were really like. I wanted to take them out of the frames and subvert the “male gaze” in order to present them as real women rather than anonymous objects.
Some of the models I chose to write about were gifted artists in their own right, for example Suzanne Valadon. Many of the other stories are centred around art and artists - an imagined letter from Frida Kahlo to her sister Cristina; a female journalist who goes to the house of a famous but ageing painter (also female) and subtly has her preconceptions altered; a woman who is picked up in a nightclub by a man who wants to recreate Manet’s Olympia.
Other stories are based loosely on historical characters or events - an hysteric being studied by Jean-Martin Charcot; the woman who shot Andy Warhol; a nearly-drowned young woman who might – or might not – be the Grand Duchess Anastasia.
I hope I have succeeded in approaching these subjects - these women - from a fresh angle, rather in the manner that Angela Carter and Emma Donoghue breathed new life into the fairy tale. Some stories stick more closely to known facts about the real lives of my characters than others, but in no sense are these stories intended to be biographical sketches. I hope, rather, to suggest some sense of universality – that these stories show the potential of every woman to be anything she chooses.