What exactly is a muse?

Francine Prose takes nine famous cases and folds through its layers, the muchness of desire, projection, dependency, rivalry, caretaking, erotic fixation and artistic theft. Her subjects include Hester Thrale and Samuel Johnson, Elizabeth Siddal and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Alice Liddell and Lewis Carroll, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Lee Miller, Gala Dalí, Suzanne Farrell and George Balanchine, and Yoko Ono and John Lennon. 

Many of these women were artists, writers, performers or formidable intellectual presences in their own right; yet we see their obfuscation in how being made muse, being loved, being represented made them simply a part of someone else’s mythology. It is also very good on the less flattering mechanics of inspiration, all the possession, idealisation, jealousy and the tendency of art to dehumanise through beauty. 

Aurum Press, London, 2003. Illustrated paperback edition; originally published by HarperCollins in 2002. Light shelf wear and minor rubbing to covers and edges. Internally clean and firmly bound. Very good condition.