The Secret Life of Sunflowers

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses mental illness.

While the story of Emsley Wilson is fiction, Johanna Bonger was the real wife of Theodore van Gogh, Vincent van Gogh’s brother. Johanna was born on October 4, 1862. Calling herself “Jo,” she grew up in the Netherlands and worked as a teacher at a girls’ boarding school in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Her parents were middle class.

Jo married Theo van Gogh in 1889, and their son, Vincent Willem, was born in 1890. After Theo’s death from syphilis at age 33 in 1891, which is not presented historically accurately in the novel, Jo returned to the Netherlands and went on to marry Johan Cohen Gosschalk—another Dutch painter—in 1901. When Theo died, Jo discovered that he owned more than 400 paintings and hundreds of drawings by Vincent. She would spend the next 35 years publicizing Vincent’s work, and her son would later undertake the task after her death. As described in the novel, Jo also compiled and edited the correspondence between Vincent and Theo, which was published under the title Letters to His Brother in 1914. Later, Jo became active in politics, especially the socialist movement.