She begins to paint fragmented images of Mathew Pearson, secretly and obsessively. But Mathew Pearson has a wife, a small, laughing, preg-nant creature, whom Bethesda's mother befriends. On the stillest day Bethesda performs an act so bold and violent that it shatters all their lives - she performs a very bloody and risky emergency caesarean on Mathew's wife, using a piece of mirror glass, to deliver a baby daughter, leaving the mother dead. The Stillest Day is an exquisitely taut and shocking vel about a young woman at the turn of the century who transgresses - both in life and in art - the limits set down for her.