The Muse

By Amy Ellis

A scandalous and seductive love story of a young artist thrust into the indulgent world of art, sex, and money.

 

In Georgian London, Elizabeth spends her precious free time painting watercolour flowers at the kitchen table. Art is not only an escape from the monotony of chores but a way to find a suitable husband who can give her security and a stable future. That was all she ever wanted until she met John, a talented painter with connections and patrons, who offered to take her on as a student and model for his new works.

 

Being given the freedom to paint what she likes, Elizabeth is quickly seduced by John's world: art, beautiful women, wealthy patrons, and the opportunity to earn her own money by becoming London's premiere erotic portrait artist. But her newfound freedom comes at a cost and when her business is picked up in London's scandal papers, there's no way to go back to the stable life she once craved.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Amy Ellis
• Release date: May 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9781739698614

Amy Ellis

Amy Ellis is a Longwood University graduate with a BA in English/Creative Writing and a minor in Children’s Literature. She is currently working on her Master's degree in Digital Publishing from Oxford Brookes University in the UK. She is the founder of The Self-Publishing Toolbox, a resource for self-published authors. Find out more about the toolbox at selfpubtoolbox.com.

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The Muse

Amy Ellis

First Published 2022 by Amy Ellis, London UK

ISBN 978-1-7396986-1-4

Copyright © Amy Ellis 2022

Amy Ellis hereby asserts her moral right to be identified as the author of this book in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

The Muse is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Cover Illustration by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (French, Montauban 1780–1867 Paris) and Workshop. Image from The Met.

This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published.

Visit amy-ellis.com to learn more about the author’s other books or sign up for her mailing list to be the first to hear about new works and other exclusive content.

The Muse

You know what happens to women like me?

There are a hundred and fifty thousand bodies

buried nearby in unmarked graves,

their headstones worn from long summers of rain, toppled

over and cut into flagstones, ground down by strangers’

footsteps on the threshold. There is no poets’ corner for us:

the presence of our paint stained hands, the pigment powders

under our nails are blood moons, a dust storm

brought up from the Sahara. We turned the sky red.

I painted those covered up pictures layered in dust,

the portraits in your grandmother’s attic are now unknown

retrospectives at the small gallery, my unread signature.

Someone paid me to paint those breasts in the rose garden and turn their lovers

into hidden pictures, discarded. Lewd pastel portraits

of your great-great-something grandmothers stripped

out of their corsets and chemise. They used to touch

each other too, pressed together like flowers

between the pages of your thrift store poetry books.

Invited me into their bedrooms and memorialised their bodies

where I am just bones somewhere, a skull, a sternum.

In memoriam of me and my breasts and the men

I let paint them and the lovers that held them.

I sold a hundred portraits of my body

to buy this nameless grave I’m in.

The Beginning

The day I learned to paint was the kind of crinkly, sugary

day that hurts to sink your teeth into.

My mother, at the table with her paints.

The blocks of colour dented with her dreams.

Her brush washed against the page

like a hand on a bruise

while my brush bled. She taught me

to mop up the mess.

The bristles feathered and flung colour

in all the wrong places. The purple bled

into green, a bruise shifting to the brown of riverbank.

We tapped the brushes against the side of glass until I made

something in the shape of a petal and repeated until I bloomed

a single flower that we set outside to dry in the sun.

Sunday afternoons

are a ritual spent humming and licking

the brush to the page. The dented kitchen table turned

a stack of florals on the windowsill, piled up in my hope

chest among my unfinished linens.

I tried to wash away the future with watercolour while

my mother held the pictures to the light: it is an accomplishment

meant to be hung on the wall in the kitchen between

church and supper and putting the children to bed

to impress a man. A pastime

not a lifetime of watercolour.

My Father

My father was a wig maker,

spent his days hunched over a bust

sewing the long hairs into place.

His spectacles sliding down his nose

as the early winter sun waned in the sky.

He could afford a whole house just for us,

and was thankful for a small family.

While the other homes teemed

with small children, crying

in their sodden nappies,

ours was a sanctuary of four.

Love

And in those long afternoons

around the kitchen table

my mother would tell me

stories of how she met our father

and their long engagement

where he would write her long poems

and she would illustrate them, saving

the pages as a story for her children.

In church I gaze over my shoulder

and crave the contact of a man

I could marry and carry on the habit

of swirling paint in a glass jar, leaving

rings behind on the table full of blues

and the muddled purple of too much colour.

I’d paint every flower he’d bring me

and save them until their edges curl

and the pages crumble away like ash

or dust or bodies in the grave,

forgotten in that dull floral of decay.

The Shop

The childhood afternoons watching my father

in his shop, sewing each strand into place,

curling, moulding, fixing a hairstyle worthy

of a wealthy customer.

Out from under my mother’s feet

my toes tapped the floorboards

as the hours passed, helping little

but providing good company in the quiet shop.

On days his customers would come in,

I stood by the