SOURCE: Goodman, Charlotte. “Portraits of the Artiste Manqué by Three Women Novelists.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women's Studies 5, no. 3 (1981): 57-9.

In the following essay, Goodman reviews three contemporary novels that employ the Artiste Manqué, a literary device in which the artist-protagonist's talents are sabotaged by weaknesses in themselves or those close to them.

As fiction became increasingly autobiographical in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many novelists began to write about artist protagonists. Novels such as Henry James' The Tragic Muse, D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, James Joyce's Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man, Mary Austin's A Woman of Genius, and Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark all trace the growth and development of artist protagonists and describe their struggles to free themselves from the restrictions imposed by their environments. Still other novels consider the careers of artistes manqués: those whose talents are undermined...