100 books like Camille Claudel

I’d never have guessed I’d be so beguiled by a book about moss. Or, more precisely, about Alma Whittaker, a bryologist observing moss.

I enjoyed this book's ‘differentness’. It’s an episodic story, unusually structured, with various life-like trailings-off of plotlines, characters, and marriage, but no less gripping for that.

Researching natural sciences in the nineteenth century is skilfully described, but it’s Alma who lingers in the mind. Its sentences, I thought, are beautiful too.

Friendship, romance, betrayal, drama, music, adventures, beauty, and tragedy, this book has it all. It is a magnificent work of history and Latin culture that immediately took me back from my home country, Brazil, and to another time, pre and post WWII. It is the story of two girls with opposite backgrounds, who grew up together and embraced their artistic careers and dreams of becoming music stars. Graca, the samba singer, the main one on the front stage, with her beauty, charisma, and unique voice; and Dores the songwriter, behind the scenes, with her poetry, the lyrics, the rhythm, the passion, and the determination to be a music group leader. She has the stamina to never give up.

This particular book made me fall in love with historical fiction. Rich in details, well researched, and carefully woven, it was hard to separate what was fiction, what was real. As the… show more.

Elizabeth Berg wanted to read a novel about George Sand but couldn’t find one…and so she wrote it herself. In The Dream Lover, Berg unfolds the story of Aurore Dupin, who boldly left a loveless aristocratic marriage to make her own way in 19th-century Paris. She adopts the pen name George Sand and becomes France’s bestselling female novelist, living a bohemian lifestyle and scandalizing society by having high-profile love affairs and, even more outrageously, by dressing in men’s clothing. I love stories about trailblazing women, and Berg compellingly conveys how risky and courageous Sand’s actions were at a time when women had few rights.

I love to read about artists in Paris in the 1930s. And this book is about a woman who tries to leave the world of modeling to become a photographer, and then she morphs again into one of the only WW2 journalists.

Lee Miller was a real person and she fell in love with Surrealist Man Ray in Paris. 

Rilke, a shy young Austrian poet goes to Paris in 1902 to write a book about Rodin, a famous and famously difficult sculptor twice his age. Not only do they become friends but the ideas they shared about art and creativity are influential to this day. Guest appearances by Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, George Bernard Shaw, and many other notable artists and writers.

I am an art dealer who is also a writer so I was fascinated to learn about the relationship between Rodin, a great sculptor whose work I know very well, and the young poet Rilke, whose work I knew little about. Art and poetry come from the same wellspring of imagination and both artist and poet were inspired by each other despite the difference in their age and practice.

Another story that's impossible to forget – actually this is a novella in a collection of stories with this name. Again, about a lost house in a forest in France, an artist, a young man in love, and the two young women who bewitch him in turns. John Fowles is an English writer from the 1960s, whose work I loved when young and still do. He was much influenced by Alain-Fournier.

I love this classic study in which Huizinga vividly portrays the colorful era in which my heroin, Christine de Pizan, lived. Huizinga shows that late medieval society was full of striking contradictions, among them chivalry vs cruelty, courtly love vs vengeance, blissful visions of heaven vs horrific visions of Hell. 

Eleanor of Aquitaine is certainly one of the most formidable women of the Middle Ages; not just because she was queen to two kings, but because she had the courage to openly defy them both.

Consequently, I raced to order Coirle Mooney’s first novel in her The Medieval Ladies series, followed quickly by the second, The Cloistered Lady. I absolutely love the author’s ability to craft vivid descriptions of time and place, especially the uncommon setting of the nunnery at Fontrevault. Joanna, Queen Eleanor’s lady-in-waiting, is a delightfully complex character.

Like Christina Kohl in my series, she is wonderfully human; but her fears and shortcomings are balanced out by her sometimes-surprising strength and compassion. I enjoyed all three novels in the series, but this one most of all.

Chibnall was a fantastic writer, and she was the authority on Orderic Vitalis, one of the most important historians of the early twelfth century.

I love this book because Chibnall uses Orderic’s history to explore the world he wrote in, a world in which monks mingled with knights and kings, and she examines the rapid social changes taking place in the early twelfth century. This book is at once an examination of Orderic’s work, a biography of a famous chronicler, and an exploration of Anglo-Norman society in the early twelfth century.

It’s a fantastic place to start if you’ve never read anything on Anglo-Norman England, and it’s a great way to deepen your knowledge if you’re already familiar with this corner of the past.

Last, but certainly not least, Queens, Concubines, and Dowagers was a book that helped formed the field of queenship studies, now a booming industry. Stafford teaches us how to think about the meaning of queenship, the sources and limits of the queen’s power, and the evolution of her office; she tells the stories of a number of remarkable early medieval women along the way in what is now England, France, and Germany. Deeply influential for me as I sought ways to think about queenship in later periods, this book remains widely available, accessible, and influential.