In this beautifully constructed Russian doll of a novel, two Australian women leave their homeland in search of a room of their own in which to forge their art. Stella Bowen studies painting in London where she meets, among other literati, wild Ezra Pound, and the bearlike, charming Ford Madox Ford with whom she lives in the countryside, has a child and enters the glittering life of Paris in the 1920s where she struggles to survive and paint, and...