Pamela Pixie Colman Smith is young woman of stark contradictions:  plucky yet naïve, artistically gifted despite lacking classical training, fascinated by the esoteric but skeptical of the world around me. After the deaths fo her beloved mother and her troubled but well-intentioned father, Pixie finds herself in the complex, political world of fin-de-siécle 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.

Jill Dawson in Pixie, renders the real-life figure of occult artist 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.

Pamela’s supporter and friend the actor ElienTerry, Dawson fleshes out a fascinating protagonist. The cover alone is glamorous a floral-frocked woman brandishing a paintbrush and a quill beneath a glowing sum, a tiny Doctor Bird, endemic to Jamaica, hovering nearby. The image is based on Colman Smith’s original artwork, which reminds WB ( Willie) Yeats, one of many famous figures to pepper Pixie’ world, of an “innocent Aubrey Beardsley”, writes Dawson.

Pixie which spans Jamaica, the US, and the UK opens with a lengthy prologue. It’s 1896 and Pixies’s mother is trying to tell her 18-year-old daughter a “very big secret” before she dies: “She’s awful quiet – and though I’m close I don’t properly hear. It’s just a mumble. I don’t understand”.

Pixie in her twenties ruminating over what the “important” secret could have been, unable to ask her father, a womanising drinker who dies heavily indebted a few years after her mother. Pixie is constantly fretting about other people’s reaction to her appearance. “I heard myself whispered about and called a Japanese: or a Negro. She tells her cousin after one Brooklyn gallery owner includes four of her watercolours at an early show. Orphaned and all but penniless, Pixie faces a life that would have been very different if she hadn’t met “Miss Terry” on a trip to Devon to visit Sabine Baring Gould, a priest and writer, before her father’s death.

Terry falls for “Pixie Pamela”. The work Terry gets Pixie with the Lyceum Theatre company, illustrating programmes and posters and more will be a financial and social lifeline. Terry’s Invert daughter Edy and her female partner Christopher will open Pixie’s eyes to a different type of love, as well as friend whose interests include the occult and tarot.

Pixie by Jill Dawson, Bloomsbury £16.99/$29.99, 400 pages.