This brings me to the trivial problems, which are all about tone. What begins as bemused humour (about Johnson, Dodgson, Lou Salomé) ends as heavy sarcasm (about Rossetti, Edward Weston, Yoko Ono; e.g. ‘Yoko bravely opened her mind to the spiritual aspects of high finance.’) Again, I hardly disagree. But sarcasm is for polemic, not literature — and polemic is what The Lives of the Muses too often feels like, a polemic against the men who oppressed Lizzie Siddal or Charis Weston, or left Lee Miller’s photographs to moulder in an attic for 20 years. That is, it too often feels like a narrow modern American take on the past. This effect is painfully increased for the English reader by much of its language and all its references, which are demotic American: so we get ‘worst-case scenario’, ‘way too small’ and ‘suicided’ (as an adjective), and the Pre-Raphaelites compared to Warhol’s Factory, or a Yoko Ono song to ‘the famous Meg Ryan coffee shop scene in When Harry Met Sally’. Finally, as the stories get more outrageous, the scholar in Prose recedes, and the entertainer comes to the fore. And that’s how the problems are connected: apart from the three best chapters, it’s all a bit Hollywood.

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