Muse — Elizabeth C. Ward

The seduction takes place on the Ile de Mer, an island in the Mediterranean so small and unimportant that no one is quite sure which country it belongs to. Three people meet there by chance: Thalia, vibrant, alarmingly young, a would-be writer seeking her muse who turns out to be Kneedler,thin, awkward, the skittish schoolteacher, and Waters, a once successful New York editor long retired to the island, who casts his cynical eye on the romance and Thalia's relentless pursuit of Kneedler, while he schemes his own sly and perfidious seduction.



Part comedy, part romance, Muse probes the workings of the creative mind, its relationship to sex, the passion with which both are negotiated and, finally, the way in which reality and imagination collide, take form and become art.