Reviewed by Zanne Miller

Reviewers of Francine Prose’s books often comment on her searing intelligence. The Lives of the Muses, a detailed exploration of the stories of nine women who inspired artists of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, is evidence of that. This is not relaxing reading — either in format or content — and is best taken with strong coffee, a chapter at a time. The book is dense (how she managed to boil her research and observations into thirty or so pages per muse is mind-boggling) and sometimes reads like an academic dissertation.

Prose asks the question, "What does it take to be a muse?," but she does not provide an answer. Instead, she offers a complex set of characters and more questions. It’s clear from these stories that the women, all fascinating figures in their own right, made sacrifices (sometimes with their lives) to stand in the artists’ shadows.

Prose paints both the artists and the muses themselves with compassion, though it’s not hard to tell whom she likes and dislikes. However, what was most compelling was not how the stories illuminated the lives of the women behind the artists, but how they brought those larger-than-life men to human scale. John Lennon’s first meeting with Yoko Ono and their subsequent affair becomes a very real story of a boy in love; Dada icon Salvador Dali an insecure kid with some very bizarre attention-getting schemes. None of this is easily digested -- or forgotten: After each chapter, rather than dive into the next muse’s life, the reader must sit and reflect.