Introduction : Unfinished work : the dialogue of the novelist and the painter -- Opening the portfolio : Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte͏̈, Anne Bronte͏̈, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps -- The painterly eye : Kate Chopin's The awakening -- Journey to the silent kingdom : Virginia Woolf's To the lighthouse -- Figure and ground : the portrait painter in Iris Murdoch and Anna Banti -- Painters of the Irish coast : Jennifer Johnston and Deirdre Madden -- Northern light : Margaret Atwood's Cat's eye -- Drawn from life : Jill Paton Walsh's The serpentine cave -- Space, time, and a muse : Mary Gordon's Spending -- Servants, housewives, artists : A.S. Byatt, Tracy Chevalier, Carol Shields, and Kyoko Mori