Anne Delbée’s sensitive and sympathetic portrayal of Camille Claudel spotlights the life of both an exceptional woman and an extraordinary artist. At the close of the nineteenth century, it was scandalous for a young woman to wish to be a sculptor. But Camille Claudel threw all her innate enthusiasm and indomitable will into just such a quest. In 1883, she met August Rodin, and the master accepted her as a student; soon he became her lover. After fifteen years of a passionate and stormy relationship, Camille emerged exhausted and vanquished. She died in 1943 in an asylum at Montdeverques, near Avignon, where she had been confined for thirty years.

Camille Claudel’s work possesses a rare power and visionary originality, marking her as one of the greatest sculptors of the nineteenth century. Original photographs of her work and her life illustrate the book.

With this book, now available in paperback, Anne Delbée has restored Camille Claudel to her rightful place as woman and artist.

"Until recently, it appeared that the sculptor Camille Claudel (1864-1943) had effectively disappeared from history. The 1980s, however, saw a biography by her grand-niece Reine-Marie Paris, a biographical film starring Isabelle Adjani, and both a play and this novel by Delbée. Born into the upper middle class in 1864, Claudel braved the skepticism of society and her family — including her brother, the poet and diplomat Paul Claudel — to become a sculptor. Her studies with Auguste Rodin led to their stormy affair. While he was inspired, she was left drained and — much as she resisted — her name has forever been associated with that of the older artist. Though she gained a measure of critical success, she was never able to support herself and continued to receive money from her father. A week after his death in 1913, she was institutionalized; she remained in the asylum for 30 years, until her death. Unfortunately, the melodrama that drew Delbée to Claudel has also overwhelmed her narrative. All the facts are here, but it is the tiny fragments drawn from Paul Claudel's works or Camille's few remaining letters that evoke the pathos of her life ... The facts alone are sad enough."
—Publishers Weekly

CAROL COSMAN has lived and studied in France. She is the translator of Jean-Paul Sartre’s multivolume biography of Flaubert, The Family Idiot. She is also coeditor of an anthology of twentieth-century women poets in translation, The Other Voice, and of The Penguin Book of Women Poets. She lives in Berkeley, California, with her husband and two sons.