Review by Tracey Foster of "Muse" by Ruth Millington

What came first, the artist or the muse?

Exploring this question is the very heart of this book, looking at artists who had complex relationships with their chosen muse. They were often supported, inspired and encouraged in their art by figures whose roles have fallen into obscurity, leaving us with only an image to construct a legend about: "The perception of the muse is that of a passive, powerless model at the mercy of an influential and older artist. But is this trope a romanticised myth?"

Rather than breaking the history of the myth into chronological sections, Millington explores the role of the muse in different guises. We delve into the muse as a message, performing muses, family albums and self-portraits which give delightful juxtapositions, framing Picasso’s Dora Maar alongside Awol Erizku's photograph of a pregnant Beyonce. Millington's background in TV and radio has helped to develop her direct conversational tone that keeps the content accessible to all and avoids the navel-gazing tendency of some art tomes. 

As easily evidenced on any gallery wall, females make up the bulk of the line-up, but Millington includes a few other examples such as George Dyer, the controversial muse and lover of Francis Bacon who, the story goes, fell through his skylight to the retort from Bacon: "You're not much of a burglar are you? Take off your clothes. Come to bed and you can take what you want."

Dyer's story is one often repeated throughout history; the legend is told by the victor to the spoil. Successful artists concoct a favourable narrative to add to their allure, but if we delve below the surface, we find the truth is often far more nuanced Bacon was able to create his own version about the forty-plus paintings he made of Dyer because his muse, unable to cope with Bacon's infidelity, committed suicide on the eve of a major retrospective. Bacon took many photographs of his muse and continued to use these to create some of his most famous works after he died, only admitting much later in his career that Dyer's tortured demise was his inspiration and the story behind the images. Working through his emotions on canvas he said, "I feel profoundly guilty about his death. If I hadn't gone out, if I'd simply stayed in and made sure he was alright, he might have been alive now."

Vermeer’s "Girl with a Pearl Earring" has long been the subject of speculation and led to the writer Tracy Chevalier's novel that attempted to fictionalise the gap. Recent research, however, has exposed Vermeer’s real intention. Religious allegories reimagined by the family who commissioned the paintings have been attributed to most of the works he painted in one household. The girl sitter could then be simply a young member of the family who fills in for a sequence of biblical representations.

Challenging our expectations of the role of artist and muse is Gentileschi - a talented painter who raised up to the highest levels of painting circles but who had been born a female in a time when her abilities were discouraged and frowned upon. Raped by her tutor at the age of 17 and banned from entering the art establishment, she used her own image to stare out at us and confront our ideals of the female narrative. Reimagining the classics, she retells the tales from the woman's stance in contrast to the male gaze. Her muse is never passive; her beauty is active. "I will show Your Illustrious Lordship what a woman can do," she wrote to a patron, defiant and proud of her work. Taking her former tutor to court at a time when women were disbelieved, she swore through torture in the court: "It is true, It is true." She won her case and her tutor was subsequently banished from Rome, but a cloud followed her for rape was considered the shame of the family and she was quickly married off. The work that followed depicted women wronged, such as Salome, and allowed her to exact revenge on the canvas and leave a legacy for us to interpret: "As long as I live, I will have control over my being."

Dora Maar, Picasso’s lover and sitter for over 60 paintings, was an artist in her own right when they met. A successful photographer with her own studio, she deliberately set out to attract this older man by using a knife to stab between her fingers, whilst sat at table in a cafe frequented by Picasso. This daring game worked and he moved her in with his current lover and their child. The ensuing battle that erupted was immaterial to Picasso. He walked out telling them to sort it out between themselves. Picasso's most famous portrait of Maar, entitled "The Weeping Woman," was in response to Dora's gradual deterioration into depression: "Dora for me, was always a weeping woman," he famously exclaimed. 

But Dora had a much heavier influence on his work. Deeply political and active in the left-wing struggle against fascism, she opened his eyes to the cause. Just a few weeks before he had painted "Guernica," his anti-war masterpiece. Posing for a figure of a mother holding her grieving child, photographing the whole production and helping him to mix paints, she was a huge part of its creation. Picasso was still inspired by the experience to go on to make "Weeping Woman" as a further response to the event. To dismiss it later and to attribute it to the emotional whims of a woman is to vastly diminish the part she played and add to his allure as a lover and leaver of women: "For years I gave her a tortured appearance, not out of Sadism, and without any pleasure on my part, but in obedience to a vision that had imposed itself on me." Maar was later to reply: "All Picasso portraits of me are lies. Not one is Dora Maar."

Millington happily gives the muse the last word. These sitters often play a large part in any artistic creation but often never get any credit. Their part is frozen to a moment and their voices muted. To get a fuller picture, we need to listen to their story. Here at last is that perspective: "This book will demonstrate the true power that muses have held. Without doubt, it's time that we reconsidered muses, reclaiming them from reductive stereotypes, to illuminate their real, involved and diverse roles throughout art history." 

About the reviewer
After a long career as an Art and Design teacher, Tracey Foster wanted to refocus her creative energies into writing poetry and prose. After helping others find inspiration in the world around us, she took an MA course in Creative Writing at Leicester University and has not looked back. She finds inspiration in the past and the events that shape us. Previous work has been published by Comma Press, Ayaskala, Alternateroute, Fish Barrel Review, The Haiku Foundation, Mausoleum Press, Bus Poetry Magazine, Wayward Literature, Cold Moon Journal, Madswirl, Five Fleas, The Arts Council and she writes on her own blog site The Small Sublime found here.

Review by Wiktoria Borkowska of "I Who Have Never Known Men" by Jacqueline Harpman

What does it mean to be human when you’ve never truly known another soul? Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men is a quietly devastating dystopian novel that explores freedom, identity, and survival in a world stripped of meaning.

Originally published in 1995, the novel follows an unnamed narrator—the youngest of forty women imprisoned in an underground bunker, guarded by silent men and with no knowledge of how they got there. When the cage doors unexpectedly open, the women are forced into a barren, post-apocalyptic landscape, where the narrator begins a journey marked by loss, isolation, and a quiet longing for connection.

Harpman’s sparse prose perfectly mirrors the bleakness of the setting, yet it’s the narrator’s inner world that carries the emotional weight. Her introspection and resilience draw the reader in, especially as she grapples with the desire to understand a life she’s never truly lived. A fleeting connection with a young guard—one she doesn’t fully understand—captures the human need for touch, recognition, and feeling.

At one point, the women make a harrowing discovery that challenges their understanding of their own suffering and expands the novel’s exploration of isolation, punishment, and shared fate. Rather than provide answers, Harpman leans into the ambiguity, which only deepens the existential questions the novel poses.

Despite its slow pacing, I Who Have Never Known Men is a deeply thoughtful and emotionally resonant read. The atmosphere is unsettling but never sensationalised, and the philosophical depth invites quiet reflection long after finishing the book.

I recommend this to readers who appreciate introspective, dystopian fiction that prioritises emotion and thought over action—and those drawn to stories of quiet female solidarity. It’s a novel that doesn’t shout—but it echoes.

Favourite quote: "We were not who we were because we had lost the world, but because we were lost in it."

About the reviewer
Wiktoria Borkowska is a first-year Journalism student at the University of Leicester. She enjoys reading emotionally rich fiction and writing reflective reviews on a wide range of fiction, literature, and film.

Review by Tracey Foster of "All Sorts of Lives: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything" by Claire Harman

 

Written in the centenary of the death of Katherine Mansfield, this book looks to explore the short life and short works of this writer. She lived with the shadow of TB in her lungs but the desire to taste and feel everything: "The passion I feel, takes place of religion - it is my religion - of people - I create my people - of ‘life’ - it is Life."

Mansfield pioneered "fragmented narratives" of so-called "small things." The immobility she faced through frequent bouts of illness slowed her to a pace of stillness, into a space of noticing. She found joy in the small, the personal, in intimate human interactions. Using notes from her diaries released posthumously, against her wishes, this book exposes the details, desires and delicious nuggets of her thoughts and experiences. We delve deeper into a fascinating life: living in many countries, Mansfield was friends with D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf; she had many lovers of both sexes, a hushed pregnancy, and an affair in Paris in the height of WW1; and she even dabbled in walk-on parts in the early movies.

In this book Harman hand selects just ten short stories, unpicking the layers and running a real-time narrative of her life at the time of writing the piece. This gives the reader a valuable insight into the facets of life that affected and shaped the author. Her expedition into Māori territory in 1907, as only one of four females, was daring and enlightening for an eighteen-year-old girl in Edwardian times, but it gave her first-hand experience of the native peoples of her New Zealand home. 

Going out alone at sunset to admire the sunset she wrote about "the long, sweet steel-like clouds against the pale blue, the hills full of gloom, a little river with a tree beside it, burnished silver like the sea." Into this scene slipped a beautiful Māori girl, "her charm in the dusk, the very dusk incarnate." This material was later utilised in her short story "How Pearl Button was Kidnapped" and although the word Māori is never mentioned, the protagonists are dark in contrast to Pearl's white skin and blonde hair. Mansfield draws on the reader's prejudices of "others" and the use of an unreliable, infant narrator, allowing this piece to explore our fears and assumptions about race. This use of a third-person voice, allowing room for personal interpretation and allusion worked well for Mansfield and was adopted in other works to great effect.

Her marriage and the many relationships that Mansfield had through her life were a great source for her stories. This was a topic she dipped into in several pieces. All Sorts of Lives investigates one particular story, written in 1915, just weeks after she had made a reckless rendezvous in occupied territories to meet her lover, Francis Carco. "An indiscreet Journey" is a comment on war but with a unique female perspective.

Mansfield uses a mix of tenses to describe the journey into a war zone, so we get a real-time narrative of the character’s thoughts and emotions on seeing the effects of war. Never published in her lifetime, the posthumous piece gives an insight into the writer’s life. whilst in Paris, she experienced the first bombing raids of Zeppelin airships and later wrote: "The night was bright with stars … I never thought of Zeppelins until I saw a rush of heads and bodies turning upwards as the 'Ultimate Fish' passed by, flying high with fins of silky grey."

The contextualising of this story in relation to Mansfield’s life makes it even more poignant. She had also recently rekindled a relationship with her younger brother "Chummie," who then enlisted and went off to France. This closeness was short-lived as he was only there a few days before suffering a fatality when demonstrating a hand grenade. The shock of losing her brother so abruptly must have given an extra dimension to the horrors she witnessed in Paris and gives us a new perspective on the internal monologue of the character in "An Indiscreet Journey."

Harman also provides fascinating insights into the sour relationship Mansfield had with her loyal companion Ida. The dog-like devotion she held throughout the rough friendship and poor treatment at Mansfield's hands became the kernel of her story, "The Daughters of the Late Colonel." Mansfield wrote it at the end of her life, suffering in great pain. In a flurry of activity, she finished it in the middle of the night. Calling Ida to make them both a cup of tea she said, "Shall I read it to you? It's about you." A story about coercive control, lost youth and regrets, highlighting the inaction and loss of confidence that continue long after the control is gone, is not a complimentary piece to write about her most faithful friend, housekeeper and nurse: "She gave me the gift of herself ... I ought to have made a happy being of her. I ought to have proved my own worthiness of a disciple - but I didn't."

Harman says, "Being able to take what you need 'from life' and avoid, or resist, overstating it is an incredible power for a writer, and one Mansfield made use of time and again." The subheading of this book takes the nub of this idea, The Art of Risking Everything. Mansfield herself said, "The truth is one can get only 'so much' into a story; there is always sacrifice. One has to leave out what one knows and longs to use." The extensive inclusion, therefore, of diary notes, personal correspondence, family photographs and period details in this book helps to retell the wider story of Mansfield's life and loves and the creation of her "little moments." 

About the reviewer
Tracey Foster started off in a long career as an Art and Design teacher but wanted to refocus her creative energies into writing poetry and prose. After helping others find inspiration in the world around us, she took an MA course in Creative Writing at Leicester University and has not looked back. She finds inspiration in the past and the events that shape us. Previous work has been published by Comma Press, Ayaskala, Alternateroute, Fish Barrel Review, Mausoleum Press, Bus Poetry Magazine, Wayward Literature, Zine magazine and The Arts Council and she writes her own blog, Small Sublime here.

Review by Helen Schofield of "Saint Maybe" by Anne Tyler

There’s something about the gentleness in Anne Tyler’s portrayal of middle-class white Baltimore families that never plumps into cosiness. In Saint Maybe there is a helpful neighbour who is ‘one of those women who grow quilted in old age – her face a collection of pouches.’ And she has a hat like ‘a gray felt potty.’ This acute observation (and sly comment) makes Tyler’s books readable and re-readable – there’s more to notice every time.

Saint Maybe focuses on Ian Bedloe. Haunted by feelings of guilt and responsibility for his brother’s and sister-in-law’s deaths, he drops out of college to bring up their children. This is prompted when he drifts into the Church of the Second Chance. Their rules: first names, Good Works, no sugar – and atonement.

As Ian’s expected life trajectory drifts away, other things come in its place: the children he comes to love dearly, and his eccentric, ever-so-slightly-socially-inadequate church family. Reverend Emmet’s shirt, Ian notices, is ‘buttoned all the way to the neck in the fashion of those misfits who used to walk around high school with slide rules dangling from their belts.’ 

Saint Maybe doesn’t skirt the everyday sadness of life – family deaths, disabling illnesses and sheer day-to-day awkwardness. Some of the most moving sections are those from the children’s point of view. Thomas, Ian’s nephew, only has one faded photograph of his mother and projects the feelings he can’t remember on to it: ‘The frill at his mother’s neckline must have made pretzel sounds in his ear. Her bare arms must have stuck to his skin a little in the hot sunshine.’

But people muddle through, the children grow up and everyone turns out all right. This was the first Anne Tyler novel I read, and her mastery of the gentle battiness of everyday coping won me over – I’m a huge fan.

About the reviewer
After a varied career in finance, commercial property and, latterly, welfare benefits advice, Helen Schofield started an English BA at the University of Leicester, and is in her second year. She lives in Leicester with her husband, grown-up daughters (sometimes) and Minnie the Mardy Cat. She is a fair-weather gardener, and also loves playing music and sewing.

Review by Tracey Foster of "Modern Nature" by Derek Jarman

There’s an omnipresent overseer throughout Jarman’s Modern Nature. It manifests in different forms as he switches from daily records of the garden at Prospect Cottage, to a memoir of his childhood and life as a film producer - from the looming presence of Dungeness power station, felt through the thickest fog as his home faced ravaging seas, to the oppressive rule of the teachers at boarding school, ever vigilant for deviant behaviour.

Covering a period from the beginning of 1989 through to September the following year, he begins with the great storm that plunged the cottage into darkness, leaving him with only the beam of the lighthouse to see by. As he watches timbers fly from fishermen’s cottages and hears the wind cry like a banshee around him, he takes us back to Kansas and his nightmare dreams of Oz: "The Wizard of Oz reminds me of the frightening power of movies to move. I’m glad it had a happy ending."

The great city of Emerald, lit up like Dungeness station, is another presence that overshadows the narrative - a hint that we don’t always get what we truly wish for. 

Jarman bought Prospect with his father’s inheritance and moved there when his HIV status became public. The memoir is very poignant as he turned to face his death. Many of his friends had already succumbed to this vicious disease and he must have known that his time was running out as he built a garden in a savage microclimate. Many plants died, succumbed to the salt sprays, turned black and calcified. The temperatures could swing from intense dry heat to bitter blasts, but he persisted and replanted after every storm, gathering stones thrown up by the surges to decorate his patch.  A keen gardener and wide reader, he knew his plants and makes references to their mythical past, cultural symbolism, and power to heal. The prose is beautiful and melancholic: "Today, Dungeness glowed under a pewter sky – shimmering emeralds, arsenic, sap, sage and Verdigris greens washed bright, moss in little islands set off against pink pebbles, glowing yellow banks of gorse, the deep russet of dead bracken, and pale ochre of reeds in clumps set against the willow spinney."

This symphony of colour, intense like no other landscape, is filmic and harks back to the technicolour washes of Oz. A film-maker throughout, he sets scene after scene for us and is mindful of our reaction. During this period of writing, he was also filming War Requiem and includes the scene of poppies from the garden, buzzing with bees.

          Scarlet Poppies
          This is a Poppy
          A flower of cornfield and wasteland
          Bloody red
          Sepals Two
          Soon falling
          Petals four
          Stamens many
          Stigma rayed
          Many seeded
          For sprinkling on bread
          The staff of life
          Woven in wreaths
          In memory of the dead
          Bringer of dreams
          And sweet forgetfulness. 

I can clearly remember the towering black obelisk of 1980s public information films, warning us about the AIDS epidemic. A newly-qualified teacher at the time, I was working under the shadow of Section 28 which forbade schools from "promoting the teaching of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship." Jarman’s experience of the prejudices and persecution he faced during this period whilst watching his friends "shrivel and parch like the landscape" is harrowing. From his refuge at Prospect, the nature is encompassing and assuaging but also a grim reminder that our time in the garden is finite. The debris he collects from the shores after high tides is dragged back and used to create a sculpture garden of decay, where distorted metal hums to the sound of bees - inspiring him to paint and write.

          No dragons will spring from these circles.
          These stones will not dance or clap hands at the solstice.
          Beached on the shingle,
          They lock up their memories,
          Upright as sentinels
          In the dry grass.

Name dropping throughout his close contacts and work diary, this book will appeal to anyone who is interested in media of the period, but it is the plants who steal the show. It is they he turned to at the end of his day and Prospect Cottage that was his refuge at the end of his life.

About the reviewer

Tracey Foster started off in a long career as an Art and Design teacher but wanted to refocus her creative energies into writing poetry and prose. After helping others find inspiration in the world around us, she took an MA course in Creative Writing at Leicester University and has not looked back. She finds inspiration in the past and the events that shape us. Previous work has been published by Comma Press, Ayaskala, Alternateroute, Fish Barrel Review, Mausoleum Press, Bus Poetry Magazine and The Arts Council.