My name is Russell Shortow. I am a writer of books of narrative history and I'm also a contributing writer at the New York Times magazine.

I wrote about Yo Van Gogh, Bunger, and her lifelong quest to help people understand her brother-in-law, Vincent Van Gogh.

My relationship with Vincent Van Gogh is, I guess, like everyone else's. Since this piece came out, I tell you, while I was working on it, a plumber came to do plumbing in my house and we started talking and I mentioned what I was working on.

He had this personal relationship to Vincent Van Gogh. University professors, anybody you talk to, has this personal connection.

The funny thing about this, the idea that everybody has this connection to Vincent Van Gogh is, in a way, Yo, as she called herself, is the one who created that.

She felt that as she was sitting alone with 400 of his paintings that she had inherited and hundreds of letters.

He was unknown at the time and she was trying to figure out how in the world to make this known.

She decided that that's how she was going to communicate this to the world by marrying the biography with the art and art historians have simply not given her credit for what she truly did.

The fact that we all feel that we have this connection to him shows how fantastically she succeeded.

So here's my story, The Woman Who Made Van Gogh, read by Orlacacity.

This was recorded by Autumn. Autumn is an app you can download to listen to lots of audio stories from publishers such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and The Atlantic.

In 1885, a 22-year-old Dutch woman named Johanna Boer met Theo Van Gogh, the younger brother of the artist, who was then making a name for himself as an art dealer in Paris.

History knows Theo as the steadier of the Van Gogh brothers, the archetypal emotional anchor, who selflessly managed Vincent's erratic path through life.

But he had his share of impetuousity. He asked her to marry him after only two meetings.

Yo, as she called herself, was raised in a sober middle-class family. Her father, the editor of a shipping newspaper that reported on things like the trade in coffee and spices from the Far East, imposed a code of propriety and emotional aloofness on his children.

There is a Dutch Maxim. The tallest nail gets hammered down, that the Boer family seems to have taken as gospel.

Yo had set herself up in a safely unexciting career as an English teacher in Amsterdam. She wasn't inclined to impulsiveness. Besides, she was already dating somebody. She said no.

But Theo persisted. He was attractive in a soulful kind of way, a thinner, paler version of his brother. Beyond that, she had a taste for culture, a desire to be in the company of artists and intellectuals, which he could certainly provide.

Eventually, he won her over. In 1888, a year and a half after his proposal, she agreed to marry him.

After that, a new life opened up for her. It was Paris, in the Bele Poc, art, theater, intellectuals, the streets of their Pégal neighborhood, raucous with cafés and brothels.

Theo was not just any art dealer. He was at the forefront, specializing in the breed of young artists who were defying the stony realism imposed by the Académie des Beaux-Arts.

Most dealers wouldn't touch the impressionists, but they were tail-vengos, clients and heroes.

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