The Muse

Jessie Burton’s Inside Story: “In many ways, The Muse is a response to what happened to me personally with The Miniaturist being this huge success. Which I feel like I can now say without feeling like a massive wanker—and that took a long time.

“There are issues in the book about wanting to make art and wanting to have people buy, enjoy and share it, and then the cost to you personally when that does happen. That balance between the private and the public. A huge strain in The Muse is around that argument between the public artist and the private creator.

“You have a character like Olive, who wants desperately to make art, but wants to hide behind a pseudonym or a male name in order to actually sell the work. And someone like Adele who actually doesn't have much confidence in her work, but does it anyway. So that was something I wanted to examine.

“I studied Spanish and English at university. I love Spain, and I lived in Cadiz, Andalusia when I was 19 for a year. It was a very rural place that made me feel I’d gone back to 1960—some of the kids there had never even visited Seville, which is only an hour away. I had a trainee bullfighter in my class. It's a landscape that I just adore, plus I love the poetry and plays of Lorca so I was desperate to set a book there. I'm also fascinated by the legacy of Spanish Civil War and the mutism that is still in existence amongst families. There was no truce and reconciliation, there was a pact of forgetting. Because in terms of a civil war and its aftereffects it was a violence that was through bureaucracy. If you had a certain name you weren't going to get a job, or certain people's children who'd been on the left, they were not going to get through life well.

“There's a lot about the Spanish Civil War offered through the brilliant words of people like Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell and Martha Gellhorn. They did an amazing job in warning the rest of Europe about the spread of fascism in Spain and its broader threat. They got it out into the newspapers, not that anyone paid much notice. But I really wanted to look at it more through a Spaniard's eyes—people in villages who just wanted to look after their crops. There’s a famous quote that says, ‘I'm more interested in my cabbages than what's happening in Madrid.”

"Then there’s London, on the other side of the story. The book serves as a love letter to my parents' London. My parents are both Battersea born, and their grandparents too. But I feel so strongly about the fact that in our education system, there is not enough made clear about our connection through our Colonial history to the Caribbean—what that means and where our wealth came from. I think that came to me slightly when I was writing The Miniaturist and thinking about the sugar trade, and the character of Otto who is black. His feelings of being in Amsterdam, but being forbidden to assimilate properly. I am staggered by how little is taught. When I was at school we just sort of learned about the industrial revolution, we didn't really learn about the transatlantic slave trade and the after effects of that.

“My London is completely multicultural. I've never known anything else—it simply is what Britain is. The character of Adele and her experiences was also my way of acknowledging that. I felt an enormous duty when I was writing her story, because I'm a white woman so I wanted to make sure I was doing so with an extreme level of thought and sensitivity. I sent the book to a professor at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad, for her to check for me, which she kindly did The research was utterly fascinating—discovering people's accounts coming from Africa, the Caribbean islands and West Indies, and their assumption that they were going to be welcomed as a Briton, because they were still British citizens. They then found that they were just clumped together under the homogenised word of ‘Black’. They'd never thought of themselves as Black, they'd been Jamaican or Trinidadian, or Bahamanian. I just felt if I was going to write about London in the '60s, how could I not write about that, really."