Rufina and the Lion

Basic specifications

About the novel

After her first novel, * The Miniature Artist *, which sold over a million copies worldwide, the young English novelist Jessie Burton published * Rovina and the Lion *, originally titled *The Muse*, to follow in the footsteps of her first novel and occupy a place in the hearts of readers with a narrative of suspense, a unique structure, and characters with clear features… to be a popular novel par excellence.

In this novel, Jessie weaves two parallel stories within two intersecting timeframes. One tells the story of Odile, a young woman from the Caribbean working in a London shoe store in the late 1960s. She makes a living from her job and secretly dreams of writing. Then one day, Odile leaves the shoe store to work as a typist in an art gallery, where she meets Marjorie Quick, a mysterious woman shrouded in secrets. In Quick's luxurious, empty apartment, loneliness, isolation, and secrecy converge. Quick helps publish a short story written by Odile, who then meets Laurie Scott, a young man who inherited a painting from his mother, a painting imbued with mystery and the scent of history…

The other story takes place in Spain in the 1930s, a witness to the horrors of the First Civil War. In 1936, an English family settled in Andalusia consisting of the father, Harold, an Austrian art dealer, his melancholic yet captivating wife, Sarah, and their daughter, Olive, who secretly practiced painting, as her father was an old-fashioned man who did not believe in women's creativity in art.

Upon arriving in Spain, a country blessed with sunny warmth, Olive meets Isaac Robles, a passionate young republican and painter who will immortalize Olive's creative madness with the oil of his passion…

History and art, legend and life

What is the link between the two stories? What secrets lie in Marjorie Quick's chest? Who is the painter of the mysterious painting that Laurie bequeathed? Questions that gnaw at the bone of curiosity to find in the folds of the exciting double novel the coolness of answers, and the pleasure of moments.

“ Rufina and the Lion ” delves into the history of Spain, which stood on the precipice of its civil war, to depict London society in the 1960s, with its distinctive liberation of women, in the image of an English Caribbean woman born in Trinidad. She is simultaneously black and more English than the English themselves, and she knows their Shakespeare as well as she knows the palm of her hand. She came to London, which she considered ideal, searching for the birth of hope and self-realization, only to find herself caught between London’s rain and its racism.

The novel bridges a gap between two young women struggling in the difficult paths of creativity; one in the thirties and the other at the end of the sixties, to reveal the status of women in the history of art, and the developments of that during the twentieth century.

(Rovina and the Lion) is, above all, a feverish novel, a turning page that keeps you on the edge of your seat until the very last line, all within a solid structure and a comfortable, exciting transition.