Out of Bohemia: A Story of Paris Student-Life

The year is 1895. Beryl Carrington crosses the Atlantic with her sketchbook and her ideals, landing in a Paris that both beckons and corrupts. She is young, American, and dangerously earnest, and three painters immediately fall in love with her. There is Georges, half-wild and half-honest, keeping a mistress while pursuing something he calls purity. Clayton, who paints like a monk and loves like one too, with no room in his devotion for anything but Art. And Harold, who left Manhattan money for bohemian rags but cannot quite shed the reflexes of his class. Beryl must choose, but the novel knows that choosing a man is also choosing a version of herself. What begins as a simple fin de siècle romance becomes a quietly devastating examination of what it costs a woman to carve out a space for herself in a world that expects her to be someone's complement. Fosdick writes with sharp eye for the way Paris liberates and devours, the way innocence is both a liability and a kind of power. The book endures because it understands that every romantic choice is also a political one, especially for women who dare to want more than the script provides.