Release Date: May 20, 2025
Size: 5.25 x 8
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-57869-194-4
eBook ISBN: 978-1-57869-195-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2025903035
Booksellers and Libraries: Order Info Here or at Ingram.

SYNOPSIS

In 1892 Paris, Annie Shaw longs to escape the confining American Colony where she’s lived for twenty years as a quiet Civil War widow. As a practicing artist, she immerses herself in the Belle Epoque’s vibrant life of art, literature, and music. But when her domineering mother-in-law announces plans to move in next door and make Annie her permanent caregiver, Annie feels entrapped and must choose between being responsible for others—her expected societal role—or living her life on her own terms.

A reimagining of the life of which there was no historical record, Portrait of an Unseen Woman: A Novel of Annie Shaw is a bold historical novel that confronts the constricting Victorian norms of the late nineteenth century.

Praise

“Annie, the widow of the Civil War hero Robert Gould Shaw, comes to a deeply felt fictional life in these pages.”

—Baron Wormser, author of Some Months in 1968: A Novel

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“Roberta Harold knows how to put a good story together. Annie Shaw, who has endured half her adult life in the shadows as the widow of Robert Shaw, a revered Civil War hero, is struggling to shed the suffocating role society has assigned her and find her own identity. Harold follows her into the brash and heady art world of Paris during its Golden Age where the real-life Annie Shaw disappeared into history and completes her story. The food descriptions will make you ravenous.”

—Mary Hays, author of Learning to Drive

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“An engaging, moving and witty novel, filled with fascinating characters and a vivid sense of the exuberant, risk-taking artistic world of late nineteenth century Paris. Annie Shaw is an appealing character, honestly and lovingly drawn, in her yearning for a freer and more creative life, beyond her role as faithful Civil War widow, sister, aunt and daughter-in-law. As Annie starts to discover her own path toward self-expression and love, she offers crucial support for those around her who break away from society’s restraints of race, gender, and sexuality.”

—Harriet S. Chessman, author of Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper

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“Portrait of an Unseen Woman evokes the fashions, cuisine, music, and, above all, painting that made Paris such a dazzling destination at the end of the nineteenth century. For the long-widowed protagonist Annie Shaw and the other Americans in her expatriate community, this time and place represented both escape from the strictures of privileged lives in New York and Boston and a crucible within which to encounter both personal and national confusions in the aftermath of the Civil War. Harold’s vivid descriptions and nuanced dialogue make reading her novel a highly absorbing experience...” 

 —John Elder, author of Reading the Mountains of Home and Picking Up the Flute: A Memoir in Music

Meet the Author

Roberta Harold is the author of two historical mysteries, Heron Island and Murdered Sleep, as well as numerous articles, reviews, short stories, and poems. A native of Scotland and 2001 graduate of the Bread Loaf School of English, where she won its 1999 Poetry Prize, she lives with her husband and cats in Montpelier, Vermont.