All loved, and were loved by, their artists, and inspired them with an intensity of emotion akin to Eros.
In a brilliant, wry, and provocative book, National Book Award finalist Francine Prose explores the complex relationship between the artist and his muse. In so doing, she illuminates with great sensitivity and intelligence the elusive emotional wellsprings of the creative process.
Maureen Corrigan
Rollicking … Almost too much fun to read.
Time Magazine
"A supple work of cultural history."
Time magazine
A supple work of cultural history.
Newsweek
Sad, glamorous and entirely riveting.
Los Angeles Times Book Review
Juicy reading …. a thoroughly researched, highly opinionated series of fascinating double biographies.
Art News
Prose taps into the power of nine in this inspired book.
Atlanta Journal Constitution
Smooth smart and altogether engaging.
Book Forum
Exceptionally well researched … an elegant study.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
With elegance, eloquence and majesty, Prose has give us a glimpse of the tangled webs of art and Eros.
Wall Street Journal
A wonderful combination of argument and literary portraiture.
Columbus Dispatch
Packed with fascinating details.
San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
Prose has done a great service in her just reconsideration of the rather strange, complicated role of the muse.
Gotham Magazine
Richly drawn … Prose approaches the artist-muse relationship with respect and wonder.
Washington Post Book World
Entertaining … Prose’s indignation, intelligence, scorching wit and critical insight have full play.
Entertainment Weekly
Lively and compassionate
Minneapolis Star Tribune
A remarkable book...piquant, intelligent, provocative—and sometimes haunting.
San Francisco Chronicle
Francine Prose humanizes nine women who, in some cases, have been idealized beyond recognition. Hurrah for real women.
USA Today
Stylish writing … a clear-eyed view .. cherry-picked examples.
Atlanta Journal & Constitution
"Smooth smart and altogether engaging."
bn.com
The Barnes & Noble Review
In the classical world, the muses -- all nine of them -- were daughters of Zeus who inspired poets, musicians, and other creative types to produce works of genius. Today, says Francine Prose, the word has been weakened and is used almost exclusively to refer to the chic women who help fashion designers inform their latest lines. But in her scholarly account, Prose (a National Book Award finalist for her novel Blue Angel) presents nine real women who moved men to greatness and who were not mere catalysts but worthy of note on their own, in many cases deserving a share of the credit for the work they helped create.
Each chapter is a mini-biography of a woman's life and the way a male artist figured into it. We see the muse as prompter and creator in her own regard, like memoirist Hester Thrale, whose letters to Samuel Johnson helped form his later works. In Alice Liddell, the inspiration for Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the muse is at her most passive, asserting her independence of the child-loving author only by failing to remain seven years old forever. And with Yoko Ono, there is the muse as artist in her own right, who claimed not to have heard of the Beatles before meeting John Lennon, and whose avant-garde tendencies some blamed for his musical downfall.
To hit the mystical nine, Prose stretches a bit. For every Suzanne Farrell collaborating on ballets with George Balanchine, or every Gala Dalí cosigning canvases with spouse Salvador, there are personae only a graduate student would be likely to know. We learn of "serial muse" Lou Andreas-Salomé's involvement with Friedrich Nietzsche, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Sigmund Freud, and of how Charis Weston had to vie with a toilet for the attentions of her photographer husband, Edward. But these lesser-knowns help make the book a complete analysis of notable women who motivated men of achievement -- usually at the expense of their own -- and lived with the consequences. Katherine Hottinger
The New Yorker
"She is either Muse or she is nothing," Robert Graves wrote. After the Renaissance, the Greek goddesses of artistic inspiration were replaced by real -- if idealized -- women (think Dante and Beatrice). In these well-researched essays, Prose examines the lives of nine women who inspired some of history's most prominent artists and writers, including Samuel Johnson, Man Ray, and John Lennon. Nearly all these muse-artist relationships were distinguished by tragedy, and only five were sexually consummated; as Prose notes, "The power of longing is more durable than the thrill of possession." What emerges by the end of the book, oddly, is a case for the singularity of artistic influence: the author shows that Lewis Carroll's attachment to Alice Liddell was not at all like Nietzsche's sense of intellectual kinship with Lou Andreas-Salomé, nor was Yoko Ono's involvement with John Lennon as fruitful as Suzanne Farrell's with George Balanchine. The strongest essays here, on Liddell, Farrell, Ono, and Lee Miller (a Vogue model and photographer who posed for and worked with Man Ray), pointedly refute the notion that the role of the muse is a passive one, and offer in its place a complicated vision of the necessary contradictions of artistic life -- including the desire for both feverish devotion and artistic independence, and a sense of the truth of beauty and the transience of it. Prose's broader conclusions about culture can seem hasty, but the book's achievement is its quiet reëvaluation of the received notion that genius is solitary in nature.
Publishers Weekly
"I have never seen you without thinking that I should like to pray to you," says the poet Rilke. The object of his devotion is the astonishing Lou Andreas-Salom the woman who played muse not only to Rilke, but also to Nietzsche and Freud. The idea of the muse seems an initially quaint, if not flatly sexist charge. Acclaimed novelist Prose (Blue Angel, etc.) confronts that honestly when she asks: "Doesn't the idea of the Muse reinforce the destructive stereotype of the creative, productive, active male and of the passive female?" Politically incorrect or not, the muses, as Prose presents them, genuinely "illumine and deepen the mysteries of Eros and creativity, as each Muse redraws the border between the human and the divine." In nine biographical narratives, Prose examines a range of relationships between artists and the women who gave them their divine spark. Though the artists, among them Lewis Carroll, Salvador Dal! and John Lennon, can easily be viewed through the lens of obsessional pathology, Prose makes a remarkable case for the exceptionality of these women in their own right. Lee Miller for example was not merely the muse to Man Ray, but an accomplished photographer, and Suzanne Farrell, Balanchine's muse, a virtuosic ballerina. Prose's project is to probe the mystery of inspiration, not to solve it once and for all: "one difference between magic and art is that magic can be explained." From Samuel Johnson's caretaker and trusted friend Hester Thrale to Dali's wife, Gala, Prose demonstrates the strength and unique quality of influence each muse had on her artist. (Sept. 20)
Library Journal
A noted novelist turns to nonfiction to explore the concept of the muse, showing that women from Gala Dali to Lou Andreas-Salome and Suzanne Farrell were not passive recipients of male regard but powerful in their own right. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Astute cultural history examining the role that nine women played in the lives of male artists who obsessed over them. Prose's first book-length piece of nonfiction delivers on a subject she's written about so well in her novels (Blue Angel, 2000, etc.): the power of women to live outside convention, often by capitalizing on their position as the objects of men's desire. From Alice Liddell, who asked Lewis Carroll to tell her a story one summer afternoon, to Yoko Ono, who moved John Lennon to embrace politics, the muse is still a potent force, writes the author. Her subjects often received short shrift, however; they were perceived either as inanimate objects, a perspective that belied their power while playing into feminist theories of domination, or as destructive parasites exploiting the artists they motivated. In a refreshing twist, Prose argues that the women she chooses to redeem from history's dustbin were more often cagey types themselves, motivated by love of art. They used relationships with artists to rescue themselves from the boredom of middle-class housewifery and to indulge in their own intellectual pursuits. In short, they became friends with artists because they were artists. The weakness of men is another theme here. Samuel Johnson needed Hester Thrale; he simply couldn't take care of himself and for years lived with Thrale and her husband because no one else would tell him to change his clothes. Lewis Carroll had his issues with young girls. Nietzsche, for all his talk of supermen, was unable to muster a mature stance toward Lou Andreas-Salome: he loved her but didn't want to admit it. Thrale and Salome are good examples of Prose's kind of muse: when their artistsbecame too constrictive they moved on, often to true love, and wound up writing books of their own. An excellent companion to studies of the men included here, and a wonderful work of revisionist biography on its own.
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