“Can you imagine posing naked for your brother?” boggles Sophie Haydock. “Or stripping to your underwear for your sister’s husband? The more I read about the women who sat for Egon Schiele’s paintings, the more questions I found myself asking…”
With all the Austrian artist’s muses long dead, the 38-year-old journalist could only answer those questions in fiction. Her incendiary debut novel, The Flames, allows readers to speculate about the lives of women whose faces are now world famous, but whose lives remain mysterious. Haydock sweeps readers back to late 19th- and early 20th-century Vienna to tell the stories of four women: the sister, wife, lover and sister-in-law of Egon Schiele (1890–1918). It’s a richly involving narrative that, Haydock has realised, “also works a bit like a personality test. Because the women are all such different personalities, I’ve found readers tend to connect strongly with one in particular”.
