A portrait of the artist as a young woman

Novels about women (or young women) writers and artists. A mixture of young adult/children's novels, and women's novels of last century and this, with emphasis on this. The YA novels are the most optimistic, ending as they do in that time of hope after the artist has discovered her vocation but before she has experienced the personal and professional rejection that is the lot of many artists, and especially before she has begun to be ground down by the conflict between love and art which is the lot of many women (at least in fiction). Prior to feminism regaining strength, the artist heroine almost inevitably sacrificed her art (as in The Story of Avis and several novels by Rebecca Harding Davies), her sanity (Save Me the Waltz) or her life (The Awakening, Jenny) - and still was castigated as monstrous and unwomanly by contemporary reviewers. In recent decades love and family have had to go; part of the modern progress of the woman artist involves her temptation by love for a man who is at best unable to perceive her commitment to her art and at worst outright hostile to it.

Novels about Writers

Listening to Billie. Alice Adams. (1978)
The Year it Rained. Crescent Dragonwagon.
Elizabeth has the mother everyone wants, the mother on whose account she desperately regrets her suicide attempt of six months past, the mother (a successful children's book editor who wants to be a writer) whom she fears to surpass by expressing her own talent.
Harriet the Spy. Louise Fitzhugh.
Can anyone forget Harriet M. Welsch, the avid notebook-keeper, dumbwaiter-rider, peerer in of windows, and candid commentator on the faults and foibles of the rich, the poor and the eccentric of her neighbourhood?
My Brilliant Career. Miles Franklin. (1901)
The Anna Papers. Ellen Gilchrist.
Refusing to face a slow, painful and degrading death from cancer, writer Anna Hand puts a cyanide capsule in her mouth and walks off a pier into the Atlantic ocean, leaving her more conventional sister to act as literary executor. Through her papers, Anna continues to affect the lives of the people who knew and loved her.
Bridgeport Bus. Maureen Howard. (1965)
The Diviners. Margaret Laurence. (1974)
Real People. Alison Lurie. (1969)
Emily of New Moon; Emily Climbs; Emily's Quest. Lucy Maud Montgomery.
Getting Out. Winifred Madison.
It's a very long time since I read this book, but I recall it ending with the protagonist, a small town girl desperate for a larger life, putting a copy of her novel manuscript in the post.
Poor Jenny, Bright as a Penny. Shirley Rousseau Murphy. (1974)
Braided Lives. Marge Piercy. (1982)
The Bell Jar. Sylvia Plath. (1963)
Mrs Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing. May Sarton. (1975)
Swann. Carol Shields.
Heartbreak Hotel. Ann Rivers Siddons. (1976)
The coming of age - political, vocational and (lastly, as opposed to solely) sexual - of Maggie Deloach, a bright sorority girl at a lily white Southern university in the early days of the civil rights movement in 1956.
Downtown. Ann Rivers Siddons. (1995)
Siddons' recapturing of a time and a place which was her time and place, in a character who was not herself - young Smokey O'Donnell, a small town Irish Catholic girl taking up a job as a journalist in a trend-setting magazine in Atlanta during the Civil Rights years.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Betty Smith. (1943)
I for Isobel. Amy Witting. (1989)
The last thing Isabel's family wants among them is a writer, someone to witness their genteel poverty, lovelessness and petty cruelties. Her journey to find herself as an artist is slow and painful.

Novels about visual artists - painters, sculptors, photographers, film makers.

Cat's Eye. Margaret Atwood. (1988)
After many years absence, painter Elaine Risley returns to Toronto for a retrospective not merely of her sometimes celebrated, sometimes notorious art, but of her life - from a girlhood spent in the bush with her parents and billiant brother, to her discovery of righteousness and malice in the persons of her school classmates and their parents, to her relationships with men, their other lovers and her daughters.
The Awakening. Kate Chopin. (1899)
A scandal in its time - a novel about the awakening to self and art of Edna Pointellier, dutiful wife and mother, an awakening at the end she realises has come too late, but which cannot be undone.
Exposure. Kathryn Harrison. (1993)
A disturbing, and convincing, study of the price paid by an artist's daughter and best subject. Her father's reputation rests upon a series of photographs of Ann posed as though dead; but his lens was omnipresent, intruding relentlessly on her private life. She is a successful New York society videophotographer, but as a gallery plans a retrospective of her father's work - and a young feminist immolates herself in protest - she starts to lose control of her severe diabetes, her amphetamine addiction and her compulsive shoplifting.
Life Class. Elizabeth James. (ca 1987)
The progress of a young woman painter from a Welsh mining town before WW I, to London society, country isolation and the Arizona desert.
The Truth About Lorin Jones. Alison Lurie. (1988)
A novel about art, biography, hidden agendas (and not so hidden agendas) and the relationships between men and women, women and women (living or dead). Polly is trying to find out the 'truth' about the painter Lorin Jones, but everyone who knew Jones seems to have known a different woman, and they all want a different biography.
You Can Have It When I'm Through With It. Betty Mace. (1976)
... Is sculptor Jenny West's response to certain all-too-familiar pick-up line. Which she hears rather too often, being female, attractive and unattached in California.
Windowlight. Ann Neitzke. (1981)
The Language of Goldfish. Zibby Oneal. (1980)
The breakdown and recovery of thirteen year old artist and mathematician Carrie Stokes, for whom childhood is passing too quickly and adulthood, especially the aggressive sexuality of American culture, is too threatening.
In Summer Light. Zibby Oneal. (1983)
Kate, aged seventeen, has returned to the island summer home of her father, a celebrated, self-centred painter. Kate has stifled her own talent in reaction against her father; the novel depicts its reawakening of that talent with the encouragement of a compassionate young art historian. Oneal has said that she wished to do a 'sleeping beauty' novel. The other parallel, drawn throughout, is with the Tempest.
The Odyssey of Katinou Kalokovich. Natalie Petesch. (1973)
Story of Avis. Elizabeth Stuart Lyon Phelps. (1877)
Points of Light. Linda Grey Sexton. (1986)
Jenny. Sigrid Undset.

Novels about performance artists, dancers and musicians

The Song of the Lark. Willa Cather. (1915, 1937)
Save me the Waltz. Zelda Fitzgerald. (1932)
A Very Long Way from Anywhere Else. Ursula Le Guin. (1976)

Sources

The Female Bildungsroman in English. An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism. Laura Sue Fuderer. 1990
Including a listing of female Bildungsromane, many of which are portraits of the artist as a young woman.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young WomanLinda Huf. (1983)
Huf identifies five ways in which early novels about the young woman artist differ from novels about the young male artist - the woman is assertive, unconventional and physically assured whereas the male is sensitive and passive; the woman must chose between her womanhood and her work, whereas the male's conflict is between sensuality and spirituality; the woman's novel contains a sexually conventional foil for the protagonist; the woman lacks a muse, whereas the man's is Woman; and the woman's novel is inevitably radical. Huf also identifies recurrent imagery in the women's novels - of monsters (the woman fears she is a monster of selfishness), of traps - cages, jars and glass bells, and of flight, especially of failed flight. She concentrates on novels up to The Bell Jar, and makes mention of more hopeful (but still ambivalent) trends thereafter.
A New Mythos. The Novel of the Artist as Heroine 1877-1977 Grace Stewart.
Tracing the myths of Faust (the conflict between the spiritual and the worldly), Demeter and Persephone (the artist as daughter and the artist as mother), and the journey to the underworld, through novels about female artists and writers. Stewart makes the telling observation that while male artists can expect to rise victorious from a battle with the demons in the underworld, a female artist often accepts a place among them - recognizing that being a good woman is impossible for an artist.
And years of library-crawling

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman begun March 1, 1998.. Last updated June 17, 2001. Alison Sinclair.