A Modern Hercules," the Tale of a Sculptress

In the marble yards and gaslit parlors of 1890s New York, Ouida Angelo wields her chisel like a weapon against a world that insists a woman's hands were made for needlework, not sculpture. When a commission for a public monument puts her in demand, she finds herself torn between the sermon-pounding fervor of preacher Horatio Nugent, who sees her art as soul-saving ministry, and Paul Strogoff, the Russian model whose physique has inspired her greatest work, and whose eyes promise something far more dangerous than redemption. The sculpture that could make her name may also ruin her. Winstock captures a forgotten moment when a woman dared to carve her own destiny, and the world watched with the particular ferocity it reserves for ambitious females. The novel endures because it asks what every artist asks: what will you sacrifice for the work? And it answers with the smoky, morally ambiguous voice of a city that never sleeps and rarely forgives.