Available Formats
One Woman Show
By (Author) Christine Coulson
Penguin Books Ltd
Penguin
8th April 2025
9th January 2025
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
Historical fiction
Narrative theme: Interior life
Narrative theme: Love and relationships
Narrative theme: Identity / belonging
Gender studies: women and girls
813.6
Paperback
208
Width 129mm, Height 198mm, Spine 13mm
159g
A daring feat of storytelling and a wry reflection on womanhood, value and power Prized, collected, critiqued. One Woman Show revolves around the fictional life of Kitty Whitaker as she is defined by her potential for display and moved from collection to collection through multiple marriages. Christine Coulson, who has written hundreds of exhibition wall labels for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, precisely distils each stage of Kitty's sprawling life into that distinct format, every brief snapshot in time a wry reflection on womanhood, ownership, value and power. Described with wit, poignancy and humour over the course of the twentieth century, Kitty emerges as an eccentric heroine who disrupts her privileged, porcelain life with both major force and minor transgressions. As human foibles propel each delicately crafted text, Coulson playfully asks- who really gets to tell our stories
Christine Coulson spent twenty-five years writing for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her final project was to write wall labels for the museum's new British Galleries. During that time, she dreamt of using the Met's strict label format to describe people as intricate works of art. Her first experiment with this idea described an imaginary woman called Kitty, who became the unlikely protagonist of One Woman Show.