A rich man's daughter, kept from every difficulty, decides she will be a painter, and finds that a studio is not a drawing-room and that talent is not enough. Eglanton Thorne wrote for girls on the edge of independence in the 1890s. The scenes in the Studio Mariano - the criticism, the models, the money - are done with more knowledge than the genre required. Thirty-seven plates of studio rooms, mothers and children, and quiet interiors by painters including Vilhelm Hammershøi and Mary Cassatt follow the novel's own argument about what a woman sees when she works.