Amazon.ca
In The Lives of the Muses, Francine Prose writes a spirited and enlightening exposé of nine women who fired the imaginations of some of the most inimitable artists and thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries. With wicked wit, she shows how these women were both exemplars of their times and iconoclasts struggling to assert their own identity within the unconventional relationships they formed with these men. In doing so, she undertakes an examination of the concept of the muse in all its permutations--from the static nine Muses of classical Greek mythology, through Dante's oft-recycled Beatrice, to its ironized figuration in contemporary popular culture.
In addition to Alice Liddell, Prose looks at the following women: Hester Thrale, a long-suffering brewer's wife whose romantic friendship allowed the depressive Dr. Samuel Johnson to continue writing; the tormented Elizabeth Siddal, an opium-addicted artist who became Beatrice to Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti; Lou Andreas-Salome, who captivated and aroused a triumvirate of original thinkers: Friedrich Nietzsche, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Sigmund Freud; the "imperious" Gala Dali, who continued to sleep with her ex-husband, poet Paul Eluard, even as she transformed herself into a phenomenal marketing machine for surrealist Salvador Dali; Lee Miller, a model who mastered the techniques of Man Ray and others, and became a talented photographer; Suzanne Farrell, a ballerina who incarnated, animated, and was inspired to great heights of artistry by the compositions of choreographer George Balanchine; Charis Weston, one in a long line of the erotically restless Edward Weston's cast-off art wives and lovers; and the infamous Yoko Ono, who fought fiercely for recognition as an avant-garde artist as she sought to subserve John Lennon into the role of muse.
Prose draws on photographs, diaries, correspondence, memoirs, and original works of art that reveal the complexity of these artist-muse relationships, and that direct her readers to other books should their curiosity be piqued (as it undoubtedly will). Author Prose has a talent for writing provocative, invigorating prose that engages and excites the reader, inspiring them to undertake wider reading. --Diana Kuprel, Amazon.ca
From 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.Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From 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 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* The Greeks envisioned nine muses, or divine female entities, as the capricious sources of artistic inspiration. When mortal women assumed this treacherous role, musedom evolved in sync with changes in women's social status, a phenomenon that Prose, a critic and novelist (Blue Angel [2000] is her latest) of cunning acumen and lacerating wit, dissects with verve and nerve in nine strongly composed, brilliantly synthesized, and deliciously anecdotal and opinionated portraits of real-life muses: Hester Thrale, Dr. Johnson's guiding light; Alice Liddell, the inspiration for Alice in Wonderland ; Elizabeth Siddal, prey to the morbid Dante Gabriel Rosetti; Lou Andreas Salome, a serial muse (and writer and psychoanalyst) who entranced Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud; the dreadful Gala Dali; the photographer Lee Miller, who "graduated from being seen to seeing"; Charis Weston, a muse demoted to "art wife"; dancer Suzanne Farrell, whose artistry suggests that choreographer George Balanchine was as much her muse as she was his; and the "reviled and despised" Yoko Ono. Always fascinated by the complicated dynamics between men and women, Prose expertly analyzes the conflicts between romance and dependence, sacrifice and exploitation, passion and genius that generate the volatile chemistry between muse and artist, thus deepening our insights into human behavior and art, the ridiculous and the sublime. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women and the Artists They Inspired FROM OUR EDITORS
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 Dalﾽ cosigning canvases with spouse Salvador, there are personae only a graduate student would be likely to know. We learn of "serial muse" Lou Andreas-Salomﾽ'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
FROM THE PUBLISHER
"In this new book, 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." "There is no ideal muse, but rather as many variations on the theme as there are individual women who have had the luck, or misfortune, to find their destiny conjoined with that of a particular artist. What are we to make of the relationship between the child Alice Liddell, who inspired Alice in Wonderland, and the Oxford don who became Lewis Carroll? Or the so-called serial muse, Lou Andreas-Salome, who captivated Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud - as impressive a list as any muse can boast? Salvador Dali was the only artist to sign his art with his muse's name, and Gala Dali certainly knew how to market her artist and his work while simultaneously burnishing her own image and celebrity." Lou, Gala, and Yoko Ono all defy the feminist stereotype of the muse as a passive beauty put on a pedestal and oppressed by a male artist. However, it's rare to find an artist and muse who are genuine partners, true collaborators, such as ballerina Suzanne Farrell and choreographer George Balanchine.
FROM THE CRITICS
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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