Stephanie Cowell – författare

Amadeus meets Little Women in this irresistibly delightful historical novel by award-winning author Stephanie Cowell. The year is 1777 and the four Weber sisters, daughters of a musical family, share a crowded, artistic life in a ramshackle house. While their father scrapes by as a music copyist and their mother secretly draws up a list of prospective suitors in the kitchen, the sisters struggle with their futures, both marital and musical—until twenty-one-year-old Wolfgang Mozart walks into their lives. Bringing eighteenth-century Europe to life with unforgiving winters, yawning princes, scheming parents, and the enduring passions of young talent, Stephanie Cowell’s richly textured tale captures a remarkable historical figure—and the four young women who engage his passion, his music, and his heart.

Sometimes he dreamt he held her; that he would turn in bed and she would be there. But she was gone and he was old. Nearly seventy. Only cool paint met his fingers. “Ma très chère . . .” Darkness started to fall, dimming the paintings. He felt the crumpled letter in his pocket. “I loved you so,” he said. “I never would have had it turn out as it did. You were with all of us when we began, you gave us courage. These gardens at Giverny are for you but I’m old and you’re forever young and will never see them. . . .”  In the mid-nineteenth century, a young man named Claude Monet decided that he would rather endure a difficult life painting landscapes than take over his father’s nautical supplies business in a French seaside town. Against his father’s will, and with nothing but a dream and an insatiable urge to create a new style of art that repudiated the Classical Realism of the time, he set off for Paris. But once there he is confronted with obstacles: an art world that refused to validate his style, extreme poverty, and a war that led him away from his home and friends. But there were bright spots as well: his deep, enduring friendships with men named Renoir, Cézanne, Pissarro, Manet – a group that together would come to be known as the Impressionists, and that supported each other through the difficult years. But even more illuminating was his lifelong love, Camille Doncieux, a beautiful, upper-class Parisian girl who threw away her privileged life to be by the side of the defiant painter and embrace the lively Bohemian life of their time.  His muse, his best friend, his passionate lover, and the mother to his two children, Camille stayed with Monet—and believed in his work—even as they lived in wretched rooms, were sometimes kicked out of those, and often suffered the indignities of destitution. She comforted him during his frequent emotional torments, even when he would leave her for long periods to go off on his own to paint in the countryside. But Camille had her own demons – secrets that  Monet could never penetrate, including one that when eventually revealed would pain him so deeply that he would never fully recover from its impact. For though Camille never once stopped loving the painter with her entire being, she was not immune to the loneliness that often came with being his partner.  A vividly-rendered portrait of both the rise of Impressionism and of the artist at the center of the movement, Claude and Camille is above all a love story of the highest romantic order.From the Hardcover edition.

Amadeus meets Little Women in this irresistibly delightful historical novel by award-winning author Stephanie Cowell. The year is 1777 and the four Weber sisters, daughters of a musical family, share a crowded, artistic life in a ramshackle house. While their father scrapes by as a music copyist and their mother secretly draws up a list of prospective suitors in the kitchen, the sisters struggle with their futures, both marital and musical—until twenty-one-year-old Wolfgang Mozart walks into their lives. Bringing eighteenth-century Europe to life with unforgiving winters, yawning princes, scheming parents, and the enduring passions of young talent, Stephanie Cowell’s richly textured tale captures a remarkable historical figure—and the four young women who engage his passion, his music, and his heart.

Sie war die Muse Claude Monets. Er war ihr Schicksal. Der bewegende Künstler-Roman über Claude Monet und Camille Doncieux.Frankreich, zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts. Ein gealterter Claude Monet blickt auf sein Leben zurück und erinnert sich: Eben setzt die Dämmerung ein, als ihn der Schein einer Schaufensterlampe in eine Pariser Buchhandlung lockt. Dort sieht er sie zum ersten Mal: Camille Doncieux, das Mädchen aus reichem Hause. Monet ist noch unbekannt und bettelarm, aber er weiß, dass er sie malen muss, wieder und wieder. Camille steht ihm Modell, wird seine Muse – und schließlich die Liebe seines Lebens. Für Monet gibt Camille alles auf, glaubt an ihn und seine Malerei wie niemand sonst. Doch statt des schillernden Lebens der Bohème erwarten sie Entbehrungen und Einsamkeit, wenn Monet über seine maßlose Leidenschaft für die Malerei alles andere vergisst. Und so wird ihre Liebe auf mehr als eine harte Probe gestellt.Stephanie Cowell, selbst Tochter zweier Künstler, hat mit ihrem wunderbar atmosphärischen Künstler-Roman dem bekanntesten Vertreter der impressionistischen Malerei, Claude Monet, und seiner großen Liebe ein schillerndes Denkmal gesetzt. Sie werden die Gemälde des Malers nach dem Lesen dieses Romans mit anderen Augen betrachten.Die Frau im grünen Kleid von Stephanie Cowell: als eBook erhältlich!