“Under all those layers of the artist’s pencil and paint are wild, blazing hearts, longing to be known.”

The Flames is a meticulously researched portrait of four very different women, all Schiele’s muses, each weaving in and over each other's lives, their influences teased out by Haydock with careful sensitivity, It’s a *very* clever idea for a novel, and as I was reading I was either googling forward (ie. trying to work out how the remaining women would fit into each other’s lives) or thinking backwards to each story already told.

If you’re not an art buff, there’s no need to be intimidated – as I was – when stepping into these pages … Haydock takes your hand and guides you (cleverly set up in the first chapter: in a way, we are Eva, picking up that ring and unravelling the past).

Beautifully written and sensual. Highly recommended.

Haydock really brings to life these four females,and indeed the setting of troubled times,with a war looming,or being played out very much in the background does not distract from them.
This story is firmly focused on the four women.
Each very different to each other,the pictures help flesh them out nicely along with the writing,and encouraged me to go look for more of the artists work.
Educating me on someone I know nothing about AND entertaining me is always a bonus in my book

I seriously enjoyed this read. As it progressed it took me a while to get used to the time hopping and I couldn't see why it was written like that until the very end where it felt like the jigsaw pieces fit.
A fascinating story loosely based on an eccentric artist who I knew nothing about. Very clever in its portrayal of the women and how its story joined up. I can definitely see why the author would want to write about this as its unusual.
The relationships in this were interesting and I was very invested in how it progressed. On finishing the book, I immediately searched for paintings, so fascinated by the portrayal and seeing the images off the page after reading the words.
Poignant and emotional. This felt very authentic.

Egon Schiele, the protégé of Gustav Klimt, accused of being a pornographer, spent 24 days in prison and had his life taken too young. Egon’s intense and sexually explicit artworks which are filled with raw emotion, have opened the eyes of the viewers over the years to learn, understand and appreciate the human nude form as art and to see a glimpse into the mind of a troubled young artist.

“No erotic work of art is filth if it is artistically significant. It is only turned into filth through the eyes of the beholder”

The Flames brings to life the untold stories of the four significantly important women in Schiele’s life and artworks. It is a story combining fact and fiction as Sophie Haydock brings each of these women back to life.

Beginning with Adel Harms, the daughter of a bourgeois family. She is passionate and obsessive and was in search of breaking away from societies confinements. Then Gertrude Schiele, Egon’s youngest sister. Their relationship has been questioned many times as being indecent. Gertie was his first muse which resulted in her becoming possessive of her brother. Vally (Walburga Neuzil), the muse of Klimt and later of Egon. She is fiercely independent, always one step ahead of everyone in order to protect herself. And finally, Edith Harms, the ideal wife in the eyes of society.

I have been looking forward to reading this book for months and it has been worth the wait as it did not disappoint. Having visited the Leopold Museum in Vienna a few times, where you will find the largest collection of Schiele’s artworks, it has been fascinating reading the reimagined lives of these brilliantly interesting women. The women who opened themselves up to Schiele and allowed him to paint them in such a raw fashion, leaving their emotions embedded on canvas for all to see.

A must-read for all art history lovers and anyone who enjoys reading reimagining's about strong-minded women in history who deserve to have their stories told.

My first read of the year, journalist Sophie Haydock’s debut novel “The Flames” was a true hit. Thank you Transworld for the early galley.

“The Flames” is based on four women in Egon Schiele’s life; he was one of the most controversial Austrian painters in early 20th century Vienna, a close friend of Gustav Klimt and known for his unusually explicit erotic paintings and sketches. I saw them at the Albertina in Vienna and even today they are provoking.

Schiele painted them all: his headstrong sister Gertrude, his very first model with whom he shared an unusually close bond. Vally: his muse, lover and model during his early year as an artists, an exceptionally free spirited, proud woman who stood by him when he was thrown into prison for his pornographic paintings and then the bourgeois, wealthy Harms sisters who both had a crush on him: Adele the older, more eccentric, possessive troublemaker of the two and Edith, the gentler, more conventional of the sisters who eventually became Egon’s wife.

Haydock does an excellent job in painting the hard, often turbulent lives of each of them, overshadowed by WWI, taking fictional liberties with her narration but staying close to what actually happened. She adds their biographies as an appendix and shares with the reader what spurred her to write this excellent novel which I found so captivating. Egon Schiele, around whose life all four rotate, ends up being a side character. This is a book about four unusually strong women during a time when the world held very different values and female lives were very restricted, a wonderful read , sometimes heartbreakingly tragic .

Fleshing out Egon Schiele’s erotic muses
By Monique Verduyn

Crackling red hair, sultry eyes, a nipple, pouting lips, green stockings, open legs. During his brief yet prolific career, Expressionist artist Egon Schiele created hundreds of sexually explicit drawings, watercolours, and oil paintings of the women in his life – from family members to underage prostitutes and lovers.

In her debut novel The Flames, journalist Sophie Haydock gives voice to the muses who posed for a man who put women at the centre of his art, against the backdrop of the morals of Austro-Hungarian society. She recounts Schiele’s life by exploring their stories and experiences with the controversial, autobiographical artist whose work is known for its intensity.

The novel consists of four parts. In ‘Adele,’ we meet the passionate, obstinate and ultimately tragic daughter of a bourgeois family. ‘Gertrude’ introduces the reader to Schiele’s younger sister, a spirited and possessive girl who posed nude for her brother. ‘Vally’ was a former model for celebrated artist Gustav Klimt, who was to become Schiele’s mentor. Vally had worked her way out of poverty and away from the underbelly of fin de siècle Vienna. ‘Edith’ was the quiet, conventional, younger sister to Adele, who committed an act of betrayal that set in motion a trail of events that would have a profound impact on them.

Haydock’s novel captures a time when political crisis and social disintegration provided fertile ground for the birth of modern art and thought. In the early 1900s, the Habsburg Empire and its values began to fragment. The economic and social issues of the period, along with the hypocrisy of the middle and upper classes, led to the formation of artists and thinkers who revolutionised their fields.

Weaving together historical context, biographical information, and her observations of Schiele’s works, Haycock offers insights into how these women influenced his development as an artist and delves into the larger issue of feminine representation, offering profound insights into who they were.

A work of fiction, it is also a work of imagination. Through her wiring, Haydock brings Schiele’s figures to life. They glow with passion and rage. There are moments when they step out of the frame, their bodies swelling with materiality and colour.

Schiele’s skill at depicting the corporeal nature of his subjects is described through young Gertrude’s emotional response to a night of sitting for him: “Gertrude feels a strange power rising in her. She’s becoming that most mysterious of all creatures: a woman. They both marvelled at it – the softening skin, the buds under the surface, the darkened hairs. Egon pushed her by candlelight, harder and harder, a circus ringmaster whipping his charge, to get the results he desired. And, for the first time Gertrude didn’t feel the need to hide her face or turn herself away.”

Schiele was hounded for producing pornographic artworks, but as art historian Alessandra Comini commented, “Pornography is meant to stimulate someone else. Eroticism is the documentation of what makes us tingle. It also lies in the eyes of the beholder, does it not?”

She echoed the words of Schiele himself during his trial at Neulengbach: “I do not deny that I have made drawings and watercolours of an erotic nature. But they are always works of art. Are there no artists who have made erotic pictures?” Like Comini, Haydock’s novel suggests that while Schiele’s work is explicit, it is the viewer who makes a choice about how to see them. “You would have to choose not to see the tenderness Schiele has for the women who sit for him,” Comini said.

That said, it is equally possible to despise Schiele, particularly from a 21st century point of view. Haydock pulls no punches in describing how he took advantage of downtrodden women. But she also asks readers not to forget what lay behind each of these portraits – women who were made flesh, elevated and admired, seen for who they truly were: “Vally had never seen women presented in this way, with such unabashed confidence, as if they might step off the paper and grab the viewer by the scruff of the neck, ready to deliver a kiss or a kick.”

Their identities and true stories may have been lost to history, but Haydock allows these strong, compelling figures to speak once again.

Egon Schiele’s painting, ‘Seated Woman with Legs Drawn Up’ hung on my friend’s wall at university when we lived together in dorms. I remember going into her room and being captivated by the image, my eyes drawn to it every time I visited. The vivid use of colour and the provocative look in her eyes had something alluring to it. It demanded attention. Without knowing the painter or the model at the time, this image was bought to the fore again whilst reading Sophie Haydock’s equally captivating and utterly brilliant novel ‘The Flames.’ It is a novel set in early 20th Century Vienna, which focuses on and explores the lives of four women connected with the Expressionist painter.
What is significant to note is that even though Egon Schiele is a central presence and preoccupation within the text, it is the four women who the author develops and gives voice to in the most poignant and immersive of ways. Haydock asks the reader to consider events through the lens of these characters that played such a prominent in Schiele’s life. The woman in the painting that captivated me all those years ago was, I discovered through this book, Adele Harms, sister-in-law to Schiele. Adele frames the narrative, from the opening we are introduced to her as an elderly lady who is troubled by events of the past, traumatised, and unable to let go. The novel switches to her younger years, when she was a model for Schiele with Haydock painting her as a defiant and charismatic figure chaffing against the societal demands placed on women within upper class echelons.
Women feeling restricted in different ways is a theme that threads itself through the text. This is evident in the second individual we spend time with namely Gertrude Schiele, Egon’s sister. She was my favourite character, an individual who shone brightly from the page, nuanced and well-drawn. Her love for her brother and desire to escape the family home were central to her story and I thought it incredibly interesting how Haydock imagined their close relationship and how necessary one was to the other in their early years. Like Egon, who broke down barriers in artistic circles, Gertrude too wanted something different from the life set out for her and was unafraid to face the condemnation of many around her.
Next was ‘Vally’ a character based on Egon’s lover Walburga Neuzil, a model of the famous painter Gustav Klimt. Haydock imagines this may have been the connection that bought both Egon and herself together, as Egon became the protégé of Klimt and the pair developed an intense and close relationship. The love and affection between Egon and Valley was apparent, yet in some ways this connection felt to be the most heart wrenching. Neuzil was presented as such a strong presence, yet I felt she was someone who was often used and discarded by everyone around her largely due to her class. Raging and fighting against this ill treatment she sets off to become an army nurse. Her fleetingness in the narrative is hard hitting and it is desperately sad how her story turns out.
Last is Edith Harms, Egon’s wife. A woman again, who dares to act outside of convention and faces the consequences. Her relationship with Egon and the dynamics between the couple was fascinating and imaginatively played out. I was particularly captivated by the interactions between the two sisters. The imagining of what Edith would have thought to Egon painting Adele and having her for his muse, it is interesting to consider the dynamics, friction and tensions that would have played out.
Egon is a character central to all their narratives. I thought the writer utilised time and the passing of characters into each other’s stories well. Each reading added a layer of meaning making the reading experience incredibly immersive. All these women rise from the page with their passions, desires, rage and light. They have occupied my mind in the days after reading this book and it makes returning to look at their images captured forever by Schiele to be evocative and haunting. By painting, them Egon Schiele has captured their image but in writing this story Haydock has prioritised their stories and prompted discussions around not only what their interactions with the artist might have entailed but perhaps more importantly what their own narrative might have been.
A wonderfully compelling and evocative book. One that will no doubt provide an even richer experience with every re-read.