This is a fascinating subject, and often a fascinating book. But much of The Lives of the Muses is a disappointment, and the real fascination is to work out why.

To be fair to Francine Prose, let’s start with her best side (not a courtesy she always shows to her subjects). She is a good scholar: her research is wide, and her theoretical Introduction one of the best things in the book. And she is a good novelist, so that each Life is told with skill, and we are certainly never bored. Poor suffering Dr Johnson and clever Hester Thrale; shy Mr Dodgson and seven-year-old Alice; swingeing Lou Andreas-Salomé and her fleet of tormented geniuses (Nietzsche, Rilke, Freud); beautiful, talented Lee Miller and the even more talented Suzanne Farrell — especially these five, but also the other four (poor Lizzie Siddal and Charis Weston, ghastly Gala Dalí and Yoko Ono) all leap to life on Prose’s page.

So what’s the problem (as Prose herself would say)? There are several, both profound and trivial, and I suspect they are connected.

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