Pixie - by Jill Dawson (Hardcover)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

A sweeping and vivid novel inspired by the life of Pamela 'Pixie' Colman Smith, the illustrator behind the famed Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck--featuring line drawings from the iconic cards.

"Pixie". I like it. "Pixie Pamela". It's a good name for me: sometimes tiny and invisible. Other times bouncing up to the ceiling to look down on everyone.

It's the turn of the twentieth century and Pamela 'Pixie' Colman Smith is a young woman of stark contradictions: plucky yet naïve, artistically gifted despite lacking classical training, fascinated by the esoteric but skeptical of the world around her.

After the deaths of her beloved mother and her troubled but well-intentioned father, Pixie finds herself in the complex, political world of fin-de-siècle art, trying to get her stunning work seen and to forge a name and a path for herself in life. Across Jamaica, Devon, London and Brooklyn, Pixie is a novel of epic proportions, a tale of the twists and turns, séances and secrets, successes and devastation, of one young woman's talent, grit and determination.

In Pixie, Whitbread and Orange Prize-shortlisted author Jill Dawson renders the real-life figure of Pamela 'Pixie' Colman Smith, artist, publisher and illustrator of the still-iconic Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck, in arrestingly vivid detail, breathing life into a story that is instantly knowable, but has, until now, eluded popular imagination.

Review Quotes

"Pixie is a captivating insight into the life of the most famous occult artist you've never heard of" --PAULA HAWKINS, author of The Girl on the Train

"In Pixie, Jill Dawson has deftly conjured back into life a woman who is shrouded in mystery and the occult. For too long Pamela Coleman Smith has remained an anecdote to England's rich history of magic, when indeed, via her life and drawings for the Ryder-Waite-Smith tarot deck, she played a central role . . . I not only rejoiced in this book, but welcome it as an important work of feminist reclamation . . . Pixie is a story that needed to be told. She is in good hands, here, and a work of magic has been done. It's thrilling to live with this book" --MONIQUE ROFFEY, author of The Mermaid of Black Conch

"About how difference and quirkiness should be celebrated. And how we should trust our instincts. And it's about how hard it is to be a woman artist" --GEORGINA MOORE, author of The Garnett Girls

"A rich and marvellous story, a delight" --SADIE JONES, Costa First Novel Award-winning author of The Outcast

"Jill Dawson is a truly bold and vigorous and immersive writer, a deep-diver into character and context alike. Pixie (Pamela) Colman Smith is a deliciously, irresistibly quicksilver creation, at once bumptious and insecure, brilliantly certain of her talent and determined to navigate a world that seems to offer no place for her. Dawson evokes a vividly fascinating milieu for her, conjuring up all the extraordinary characters - the shamans and poets, idealists and eccentrics and pushers at boundaries - who came into their own at the beginning of the twentieth century, the end of one era and the dawn of a new and uncertain one" --CHRISTOBEL KENT, author of The Loving Husband

"A funny, feminist bildungsroman, suffused with 1900s atmosphere and Sapphic steaminess that will see her scoop up any Sarah Waters fans who haven't already discovered her. I loved it" --PATRICK GALE, author of Notes From an Exhibition

"A work of genius . . . A profoundly feminist book" --LOUISE DOUGHTY, author of Apple Tree Yard

"Pixie is a living, bouncing, thinking entity on the page . . . A fabulous writer and a wonderful book" --LOUISA YOUNG, author of My Dear I Wanted to Tell You

"Irresistible - a sparkling read . . . Pixie's voice skitters and skates across the page" --TIM PEARS, author of The Horseman

"Prepare to fall head over heels in love with fin-de-siècle influencer Pixie in Jill Dawson's passionate exploration of female creativity against the odds. Forget A Room of One's Own. Pixie is a cry for A Life of One's Own" --SARAH MAY, author of The Rise and Fall of the Queen of Suburbia

"A wonderful evocation of the life and times of a bewitching artist. Jill Dawson has a gift for turning up the unexpected card in any deck and Pixie is one of her best" --ROMESH GUNESEKERA, Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Reef

"Jill Dawson's marvellous character Pixie - teeny tiny and towering at the same time - paints and draws a world that reflects and refracts the extraordinary times in which she lived. A wonder" --KATE PULLINGER, author of The Mistress of Nothing

"Brilliant, entertaining, wild and inspiring . . . Highly diverting and very addictive . . . Ambition, fame, art, the occult - what more could you ask for? Pixie finally brings Pamela Colman Smith out from beyond the esoteric veil of magic and mystery into full colour . . . Jill Dawson's writing is really storming" --BIDISHA

About the Author