Focusing on ‘a more romantic age’ than our own, Abdelouahab’s gallery of muses begins around 1850 with Lizzie Siddal and Jane Morris, both immortalized by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and ends in the mid 1950s with the meeting of Guilietta Masina and Federico Fellini. Lavishly illustrated with photographic portraits, the book tells the stories of women as muses to artists, writers and musicians, in partnerships including Louise Cadet and Flaubert, Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé, and Proust and Élisabeth Greffulhe, his Duchesse de Guermantes.