Other Sorrows, Other Joys
The Marriage of Catherine Sophia Boucher and William Blake
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
This is the imagined life of a woman who really lived in the late Eighteenth Century - Catherine Sophia Boucher, called Kate - wife of the English poet and artist, William Blake. If you read between the lines of his poetry and letters, this is a story you might find. Other Sorrows, Other Joys weaves fact and fiction to tell the story of Kate's search for identity in the shadow of a man who can "see a World in a Grain of Sand and Heaven in a Wild Flower." Conventional, innocent Kate struggles to understand the world around her in the midst of her visionary husband's free-thinking crusades for freedom in religion, in politics, in love. Janet Warner's original novel dramatically recreates the story of a poet and his spiritual companion and the mystic visions that haunt them both throughout their lives.
As Kate works as Blake's assistant, printing and coloring his designs, she witnesses the psychic powers that distract William from earning a living. She endures the loss of a long-awaited child, Blake's fascination for gifted women, and his frightening trial for treason. Through Kate's eyes, we meet a parade of people prominent in 18th Century artistic circles during the time of the French Revolution, such as the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, Swiss painter Henry Fuseli, and the publisher Joseph Johnson - people whose intertwined lives were as unconventional as any Bohemians of a later time. Amidst these turbulent personal and political events, Warner reveals the compelling drama of Kate and William's marriage that survived it all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Warner blends fact and fiction in this debut novel about eccentric artist and poet William Blake, narrated by Blake's widow, Kate, an artist in her own right, who tells her husband's story through her journal entries and conversations with the couple's friend and Blake's real life biographer, Frederick Tatham. Although little is known about the real Kate, Warner, a Blake expert (Blake and the Language of Art), summons up a convincing voice for the "beloved muse" and "helpmate" ("I have a role in William's life as Witness of Visions. I sit, night after night, still as a statue beside him, and sometimes see what he sees"). She brings to life the impoverished bohemian artist and his circle of friends and colleagues, like macabre painter Henry Fuseli and sculptor and illustrator John Flaxman. Kate's journal includes her own poetry, inspired by telepathic communion with the husband who taught her to read and write: "My heavens are brass my earth is iron my moon a clod of clay/My sun a pestilence burning at noon and a vapor of death at night." Warner also describes Kate's awakening understanding and acceptance of marriage with a "free love" visionary. Blake instructs his young wife that their love is "deep enough to include others," and she takes a French lover, Paul-Marc, to counterbalance Blake's (unconfirmed) dalliances with two provocative women of the period: feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft and singer Elizabeth Billington. Warner's well-researched portrait of the Blakes is set in a detailed dream of late 18th-century England, with brief glimpses of Paris in the grip of the French Revolution via Wollstonecraft's imagined letters. Illustrations by Kate and William Blake and John Linnell enhance this historical fantasy about an enduring union.
