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Exploring the relationship between the artist and his muse, this is a collection of biographical essays on nine women and the artists they inspired. Among them there are many variations on the theme: from the young Alice Liddell ('Alice in Wonderland') to celebrities like Yoko Ono.

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The Lives of the Muses Nine Women & the Artists They Inspired Chapter One Hester Thrale On a spring morning in 1766, Henry and Hester Thrale visited Dr. Samuel Johnson in his rooms at Johnson's Court. The lively, attractive young couple had known the famous writer since 1764, when the playwright Arthur Murphy had brought Johnson to dinner at the Thrales' estate in Streatham Park, a few miles from central London. Since then, he had been a regular guest at Streatham, and at the Thrales' city place in Southwark, on the grounds of their profitable brewery. But lately, Johnson's visits had tapered off, and the Thrales had reason to suspect that he was suffering from one of the profound and terrifying fits of melancholia that had plagued him for most of his fifty-seven years. Already, they had grown close enough for Johnson to have confided his fears about "the horrible condition of his mind, which he said was nearly distracted." Unlikely on the surface, the friendship was a tremendous coup for the socially ambitious Thrales. Johnson was famous not only for having written the Dictionary , the Rambler essays, The Life of Savage , and Rasselas but for his witty conversation. Among fashionable Londoners, watching the doctor talk had become a sort of spectator sport; at parties, guests crowded, four and five deep, around his chair to listen. Johnson brought his own celebrity talking-and-sparring partners--David Garrick, Oliver Goldsmith, Sir Joshua Reynolds--along with him to Streatham, possibly because brisk repartee was not his host's strong suit. Well meaning and personable, properly insistent on his masculine right to overeat, hunt, and cheat publicly on his wife, Henry Thrale lacked, according to Johnson, the finer social skills. "His conversation does not show the minute hand; but he strikes the hour very correctly." He was the sort of rich, dull, solid fellow--"such dead, though excellent, mutton," to quote Virginia Woolf's wicked assessment of Rebecca West's husband--who turns up, with surprising frequency, in the lives of the muses. Johnson liked the wealthy brewer; he admired the manly way he ran his household, and enjoyed the benefits of his expensive tastes in food and wine. Driven by an increasing horror of solitude and a craving for human companionship, the writer was drawn to the vibrant domesticity of Streatham, and especially to his hostess, a slight, dark-eyed Welsh fireball, who was disputatious, flirtatious, quick, well educated, and (unlike many of their contemporaries) unafraid of a man whom she described as having "a roughness in his manner which subdued the saucy and terrified the meek; this was, when I knew him, the prominent part of a character which few durst venture to approach so nearly." Chroniclers of the period record the sparkling sorties that flew back and forth across the table between Samuel Johnson and Mrs. Thrale. And her own Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, LL.D., published in 1785, functions as a compendium not only of the writer's witticisms, but also of their exchanges on subjects ranging from faith to incredulity, from ghostly apparitions to the value of everyday knowledge, from marital discord to convent life, from the pleasures of traveling by coach to the rewards of reading Don Quixote , from the correct way to raise children to the necessity of constantly measuring one's minor complaints against the greater sufferings and privations of the poor. The Thrales were tolerant of the writer's notorious eccentricities. Eventually, they would assign a servant to stand outside his door with a fresh wig for him to wear to dinner, since he so often singed the front of his wig by reading too close to the lamp. Nearly blind, disfigured by pockmarks, Johnson suffered from scrofula and a host of somatic complaints, as well as an array of psychological symptoms that, today, would virtually ensure that he was medicated for Tourette's, obsessive-compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder, to name just the obvious syndromes. (The ongoing discussion of Johnson's "case" in medical literature has made him one of those figures, like Van Gogh and Lizzie Siddal, whose health care improved dramatically after death.) Happily, Samuel Johnson's own more permissive era was sufficiently enchanted by his intelligence, humor, and unflagging energy to overlook his rocking from foot to foot, mumbling, twitching, emitting startling verbal outbursts, obsessively counting his footsteps, touching each lamppost in the street, and performing an elaborate shuffle before he could enter a doorway. The Thrales were used to the doctor's tics. Yet nothing could have prepared them for the scene they found on that May morning when at last they were admitted to the writer's rooms at Johnson's Court. His friend John Delap was just leaving, and it must have been instantly obvious--from how pathetically he begged Delap to include him in his prayers--that the great Samuel Johnson was veering out of control. Left alone with the Thrales, Johnson became so overwrought, so violent in his self-accusations, so reckless in alluding to the sins for which he said he needed forgiveness that Henry and Hester were soon caught up in the general hysteria. "I felt excessively affected with grief, and well remember my husband involuntarily lifted up one hand to shut his mouth, from provocation at hearing a man so wildly proclaim what he could at last persuade no one to believe; and what, if true, would have been so very unfit to reveal." It was an extraordinary scene: the handsome brewer clapping one hand over the mouth of London's most celebrated literary figure, while his agitated wife looked on in dread and horror. Something irreversible was happening to their friendship! The balance of power and need was being tipped forever by what Johnson was letting them see. They'd arrived as friends and hosts flattered by the doctor's affections, but uninvited, and perhaps a bit uncertain about their welcome and the future of their friendship. And now they had been drawn into this theatrical, eroticized tableau, from which they would emerge as guardians, saviors, confessors . . . The Lives of the Muses Nine Women & the Artists They Inspired . Copyright © by Francine Prose. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Lives of the Muses: Nine Women and the Artists They Inspired by Francine Prose All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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Library Journal Review

Francine Prose explores the complex dynamics between the artist and his muse in The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women and the ARtists They Inspired (Perennial: HarperCollins. 2003. ISBN 9780-06-055525-2. pap. $13.95). In these nine profiles, she analyzes the lives of women who had the luck, or misfortune, to connect their destiny with that of a famous artist. Among the muses are Alice Liddell, the inspiration for Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland; Lou Andreas Salome, who fascinated Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud; Gala, the wife of Salvador Dali; and John Lennon's Yoko Ono. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

"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) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist 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

Kirkus Book Review

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 artists became 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.