A Light Woman

A Light Woman is a historical novel by the writer Catherine Gavin, published in 1986. It is set during the Paris Commune.

The book takes place in 1871, the year the Communards held Paris and twenty thousand people died at the barricades and in the starvation that came with the siege of the city. Babette supports herself as a model for painters, and the novel follows her through the months of the Commune as her circle is forced into choices they had been able to avoid: the American David Meade, who is crossed in love, and Ned Carey, whose settled life is threatened by an affair he cannot end. Gavin wrote a long series of historical novels about the great events of the nineteenth century, and this one keeps to a small group of people inside a city that is being fought over street by street. The romance and the politics are not separated: what the characters decide about each other is what they decide about the Commune.

Gavin published historical fiction from the 1940s onwards and worked as a journalist, and the revolutions she wrote about were usually seen through the experiences of a handful of individuals.