Portrait of Julia: A Novel

In 1920 Julia Robertson is a young, beautiful war widow, aware of the radical new ideas bursting into the settled thinking of post-Victorian Canada. That new thinking, about the human unconscious through Freud and Jung, about sexual frankness, about women as well as skepticism about religion, shaped the emerging 20th century world and infused modern painting, music, and literature.

Julia struggles with her conscience over the man she most trusts when she is passionately infatuated with anot...