Bohemian Lives

Ida Nettleship was a flamboyant Bohemian who gave up a promising artistic career to marry Augustus John. She had five pregnancies in just six years, lived with Augustus and his mistress in a ménage à trois, and died exhausted in childbirth aged 30. Ida’s story of unconventional love is equaled by two other Bohemian women of the same era: Picasso’s first love, Fernande Olivier, who was prominent in the Paris art scene, and the writer Sophie Brzeska, who lived with the artist Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, 19 years her junior. He would die in World War I and Sophie’s slow descent into mental instability would begin. Bohemian Lives follows the achievements and sacrifices of the three women and how their lives overlapped and contrasted, in education, childbirth, illness, marriage—and psychological disintegration. All three women had a huge influence on their more famous partner and challenged the accepted model of male–female relations of the time. At once touching and harrowing, their struggles for recognition in their own right hold a mirror up to the prejudices of an age—and what being "bohemian" really meant.

Amy Licence is a teacher. She has an MA in Medieval and Tudor Studies and has published several scholarly articles on the Tudor dynasty and Richard III. She is the author of In Bed With the Tudors and Cecily Neville. Amy has written for the Guardian, TLS, and BBC History Magazine.