"From the critically acclaimed bestselling author of Ahab's Wife, Four Spirits, and Abundance comes a new novel, The Fountain of St. James court or Portrait of the artist as an old woman."-- Provided by publisher.

Kathryn Callaghan has just finished her novel about painter Élisabeth Vigée-LeBrun, a survivor of the French Revolution hated for her sympathetic portraits of Marie Antoinette. Though still haunted by the story she has written, Kathryn must leave the eighteenth-century European world she has researched and made vivid in order to return to her own life as an American in 2012. Despite being separated by time, place, and culture, Katheryn and Élisabeth possess similar gifts and burdens; each will be called up and tested.