There is a whisper of a story somewhere else, a book called Swan Thieves about a woman painter forced to hide her identity. Jessie Burton’s second novel The Muse straddles two time zones — the Spanish Civil War and 1967 London and the subject of women’s creativity. Art of course has been her subject of choice since the best-selling The Miniaturist.
The story begins in London in the swinging sixties with Odelle Bastien who has come to work from Trinidad and who has a burning desire to write. Time and circumstance put her in touch with a job as a secretary at one of those discreet upmarket galleries, a woman called Marjorie Quick and a dishy man who happens to have a painting that he wants to sell.
The painting turns out to be by a Spanish artist called Isaac Robles and thereby hangs a tale — the story of a woman called Olive who has artistic leanings but is very certain that a woman artist will never be able to break through the glass ceiling, despite painters like Amrita Shergill.
She has also won a place at the Slade School of Art but cannot tell her art dealer father about it. Unable to speak out, she loses her heart to Isaac Robles, the illegitimate son of the local landowner and he turns her creativity into a flood of inspiration.
The only person who knows of Olive’s genius is Isaac’s half-sister Teresa. Teresa is there to nurture Olive’s talent much in the same way that Quick does to Bastien in the parallel story. Both women achieve success, one undercover, one more openly as the first of the noted Trinidadian writers perhaps.
Burton’s strength is when she describes emotion, sensuality and colour — though her heart is obviously more in describing the process of visual art through the written. Occasionally her language slips from the 20th century to the 21st, which may raise a few eyebrows in a historical novelist. Phrases like ‘the tsunami of sound’ would not have been common in 1936 or in the London of 1967.
Some of the concepts like the monetising of art for example are too modern as well. Of course that depends on how seriously you take Jessie Burton’s book and her research work. The Muse is a lighter work than her darker, more intense, The Miniaturist and it makes for a comfortable read throwing up a few questions on the nature of feminism along the way.
Anjana Basu is the author of Rhythms of Darkness
