Bibliofemme Bookclub An Irish Bookclub

Starting with writer Samuel Johnson’s muse Hester Thrale and moving on to Alice Liddell (Lewis Carroll’s inspiration for Alice in Wonderland), Pre-Raphaelite beauty Elizabeth Siddal and Salvador Dali’s wife Gala, this is a multi-biography with an art slant and a theme as fascinating as the lives of the women who inspired it.

What is a modern muse? Certainly no longer the unattainable, perfect vision of femininity thought to have motivated artists in the past. Several of these nine women were artists in their own right; most of them were not only muse but publicity manager, personal assistant, model, nurse and lover rolled into one.

Some were muse to more than one man during their lifetimes, Lou Andreas-Salomé to Nietzsche, Rilke and Freud for example. From Lee Miller (Man Ray) and Charis Weston (Edward Weston) to the ballerina Suzanne Farrelll and her choreographer George Balanchine, Prose is careful to offer just enough juicy bits to keep the story slightly racy as she digs away at her key question: who were these women and what was in it for them?

A good index and bibliography make this a superb reference book but as a sit-down read it begins to lose its momentum as it progresses. Disappointingly, although Prose leaves one of the most controversial modern artist-muse relationships to last, that of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, this turns out to be one of the book’s least compelling chapters.

It reads like a project that began with a clear aim, that of challenging the concept of passive pedestal-mounted female beauties, but what Prose has ended up with is nine mini biographies of nine very different women, none of whom can be simply categorised as muse and left at that.

Perhaps the first and the last of her twentieth century subjects offer the biggest contrast: at the age of eighty (in 1932) Alice Liddell was awarded an honorary doctorate (perhaps the only ever doctorate in musedom) from Columbia University. As far as history was concerned, her inspiration to Charles Dodgson (Carroll) was her life’s greatest achievement; Yoko Ono on the other hand is a woman who at the age of seventy-two is working to this day to leave an artistic legacy of her own.

This book is the result of an impressive amount of well-recorded research and it starts out like a bit of a page-turner, but the feeling by the end is that Prose was tiring of her own subject. Several of her later chapters could have done with tighter editing. The Lives of the Muses is certainly a worthwhile read, but perhaps better to dip in and out of nine separate times than attempt to swallow whole.