The Flames, page 40
Historical Note
This book is a work of fiction, based on the limited facts I could find out about the lives of Adele and Edith Harms, Gertrude Schiele and Vally (Walburga) Neuzil. As with any work of fiction, I have at times had to invent or to ‘rearrange’ certain episodes for the purposes of the story – such as Edith and Egon returning to Vienna in 1918 instead of earlier in 1917. But these women were real, and below is a summary of what I gleaned about their lives.
Adele Harms
Adele Harms was born in 1890 to Johann and Josefa Harms, the elder of the sisters. She did indeed die, aged seventy-eight, penniless, unmarried and with no children, in Vienna in 1968. I was told this information by Christian Bauer at the Egon Schiele Museum in Tulln at the start of my research, and it sparked the whole thread of the opening section. I wanted to know what had happened in Adele’s life for her to go from a position of affluence to one of poverty. I imagined her as a young woman, full of hopes and dreams, lofty expectations of how her life would unfold. And how she’d have been left with nothing at all once Edith and Egon died, and after the war had brought an end to the Habsburg Empire. How would she have survived those fifty lonely years? What damage did she endure?
At university in Leeds, I’d taped a postcard of Seated Woman with Bent Knee (1917) to the wall above my desk, and when I came to the realization, a decade later, during my research, that the woman in it was indeed Adele – that she was not the artist’s wife or lover as I’d once presumed, but his sister-in-law – this sparked further avenues for fictional enquiry. Adele’s blazing eyes are full of such longing – speaking of desire, disaster. I couldn’t help but wonder then if she’d been in love with the artist, how she’d felt about modelling for him, if she’d once harboured hopes of her own to marry this handsome young man she’d spotted across the street.
The resulting tension between the Harms sisters is fabricated. Adele may have been very happy for Edith. She may have been perfectly comfortable, unquestioning, in the act of removing some of her clothes for her sister’s husband, posing for him for hours as he painted and drew her. We will never know for certain. But I felt there were stirrings of powerful dynamics at play, ones that hadn’t been fully explored in fiction related to Schiele before. The women in his story often seemed to be presented with little agency, with such a bland acceptance of their role in his life that I wanted to reclaim the narrative.
Adele Harms is buried in Ober-Sankt-Veit cemetery in Vienna, in the same plot as Egon Schiele. The adjoining plot belongs to Edith Harms, her sister, who was buried on 3 November 1918. This information had not entered the public realm. Here was this woman, fifty years after their deaths, buried in the same patch of earth as Egon. Why? How? I couldn’t get an answer, but this detail spoke to such powerful unity and grief, ripe territory for an author’s imagination.
It is true that there is no gravestone to mark Adele Harms’ final resting place. She is buried without her name, her date of birth or date of death. I would like to see this rectified.
Gertrude Schiele
Gertrude Schiele was born in 1894 (I’ve used 13 April as her date of birth, but records vary) and she lived to the age of eighty-six. She died in Vienna in 1981. She is buried in the same graveyard as her brother, but not the same plot. She had a son, Anton Junior, in 1914, who lived to the age of eighty-two and died in 1997, and a daughter, Gertrude, (born in 1913) who apparently lived to the age of thirty. Gertrude’s husband, Anton Peschka, died in 1940 aged fifty-five. I am not aware of any living relatives of any of the people mentioned in the novel.
It is true that Gertrude and Egon ran away to Trieste, the seaside location where their parents spent their honeymoon, and that they shared a room there. Gertrude had a very close relationship with her brother and posed for him in the nude, and when she was interviewed by the Schiele scholar Alessandra Comini in the 1970s, Gertrude spoke openly and with tenderness and pride about the intimate bond they shared.
Vally (Walburga) Neuzil
Vally Neuzil is commonly known as Wally (which is short for Walburga), but I use the softer Vally, as the name in Austria is pronounced with the V. She died, aged twenty-three, of scarlet fever on 25 December 1917 and was buried in an unmarked grave in Sinj, where she had been stationed as an army nurse. The grave was found in 2015 and restored in 2017, the centenary of her death.
It is rumoured that Vally was Gustav Klimt’s model, and that that is how she met Egon, but this has never been substantiated. Schiele could have met her in a much more pedestrian way, in Park Schönbrunn, where he scouted for striking young models. Vally was the same age as Gertrude, but had such a different start to her life. It is said that her mother, Thekla, moved with Vally and her sisters to Vienna when Vally was eleven, looking for work. It’s possible she would have been able to read and write.
It was eye-opening to research the kind of work available to a young girl in those days, and the risks that would have had to be taken to put food on the table. There is no suggestion that Vally accepted money in return for sex, but removing one’s clothes for an artist was tantamount to prostitution in the eyes of society at the time.
Edith Harms
Edith Harms was born in 1893 and died on 28 October 1918, aged twenty-five. She was six months pregnant with her first child. This was the detail, read at an exhibition of Schiele’s work in London, that first launched the idea of writing about her in my mind. I wanted to know all about this young woman, whose life had been tragically cut short. At first, the whole book was going to be told from her perspective; that was until I discovered the other compelling, strong women in Schiele’s orbit. Edith has always been presented as the sweet girl-next-door, and the more I read about Schiele’s marriage to her during my initial research, the more I felt that everyone who knew the story was on ‘Team Vally’.
But I had empathy for Edith right from the start. The painting of her, Portrait of Edith Schiele, The Artist’s Wife (1915), standing in that colourful striped dress she’d reportedly made herself from a pair of old curtains, her eyes so eager to please, with her fingers touching in small circles of nervousness, moved me deeply. Schiele was said to have wanted to marry ‘advantageously’, and to have discarded Vally, his muse, his lover, the woman who had stood by his side. However, I wanted to depict the union between Egon and Edith as a grand love, not simply a marriage of convenience.
I was fascinated by the thought: how would the pair of them have carried the ghost of Vally into their marriage? I felt her image, those penetrating eyes, would have lingered in Edith’s mind and caused ripples of friction between the newly married couple.
Edith’s innocence, purity and simplicity are drawn from the portraits her husband made of her after their marriage. She is indeed portrayed like a sweet doll. Would she have been happy to be shown to the world in this way? Was she as sweet and simple as he depicted her to be? I wanted to inject Edith with an edge, with agency, her own dark side. We get a sense of her frustration in the drawing Egon made of his wife naked, ‘masturbating’, her face turned away from the viewer, the tension visible in the contortion of her spine. I wondered how much she must have hated being thrust into the role of model. Her reluctance, and Adele’s apparent willingness, and the confidence that oozes off the artworks Schiele made of his sister-in-law, inspired the final thrust of events in the novel.
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Acknowledgements
It takes a long time to write the first word of a novel, and even longer to write the last. Throughout it all, I’ve been so lucky to have received encouragement from many excellent people.
First and foremost, this book is dedicated to my friend, Ali Schofield, a name I’d like to see remembered. Without her, the idea for this novel would never have entered my orbit. She was visiting London and invited me to join her at an exhibition of Egon Schiele’s work at the Courtauld Gallery – an event that changed my life. I walked into that exhibition knowing I wanted to write a novel one day, and left it, my head spinning, the lines Schiele created marked in my mind. I shudder to think about the experiences I’d have missed, the people I wouldn’t have spoken to and the stories I wouldn’t have known about if Ali hadn’t been generous enough to invite me along with her that day. Ali died at the age of thirty-four in 2018. She was a talented journalist, endlessly stylish, passionate about all the right things, and a woman who inspired me. I miss her. So, Ali, this book is for you – thank you for being all that you were, and for being the spark that led to The Flames.
Huge thanks to my agent, Juliet Mushens, whose enthusiasm is dizzying, for the passion you share for the women I wrote about, and the way you championed this novel at every stage. To the rest of the Mushens entertainment team: it is such a pleasure to work with you.
Thank you to my wonderful editor, Kirsty Dunseath. I was blown away when you saw potential in my novel and embraced it instantly. My respect for you has only grown during the process of taking this book to publication. It’s a far better book because of you.
Thanks to the whole team at Transworld, who made me feel welcome and valued from day one, and who have worked so enthusiastically on The Flames – from foreign rights to audio (and to Eleanor Updegraff and Kate Samano for razor-eyed copy-edits). I particularly appreciate the excellent work of Tabitha Pelly and Lilly Cox in putting this book on people’s radar. And thank you to Beci Kelly for the innovative cover design for the UK edition.
I’m grateful to the Impress Prize for New Writers, who chose an early iteration of this book’s opening chapters as their winner in 2018. It was just the boost I needed to keep writing.
I’m indebted to a host of excellent writers, editors and friends who read early drafts and provided essential feedback and encouragement along the way: Rebecca F. John, Sally Orson-Jones, Melissa Fu, Jo Hamya, Esther Cann, and Aki Schilz at The Literary Consultancy.
I’m grateful to my circle of like-minded friends at the Word Factory, and Cathy Galvin for her comradeship, encouragement and her literary embrace.
The Flames is a work of historical fiction, based on the lives of real women – Adele Harms, Edith Harms, Gertrude Schiele and Walburga Neuzil – who provided inspiration to the Austrian artist Egon Schiele over the course of his brief life (1890–1918). Years of research have gone into this novel, and I am indebted to the kindness shown to me by the Egon Schiele community – including experts, scholars and enthusiasts – in the UK, Vienna and further afield. My sincere thanks go to Alessandra Comini, Jane Kallir, Deborah Feller, Gemma Blackshaw, Peter Vergo, Christian Bauer, Robert Holzbauer, Ewald Königstein, Hana Jirmusová Lazarowitz and Verena Gamper, all of whom I met or interviewed and who have been generous with their time and knowledge. I greatly enjoyed visiting and going behind the scenes at the Albertina and Leopold museums in Vienna, the Egon Schiele Art Centrum in Český Krumlov (Krumau), the Egon Schiele Museum in Tulln and the State Gallery of Lower Austria in Krems.
I’ve recounted many of the historical details that are known about the life and work of Schiele (although details about the women he used as models are thin), but I have taken creative licence with aspects of the story, and reimagined elements of how these women lived, what motivated them, and the tensions that may have existed between them. Any mistakes or omissions are very much my own.
Thank you to my friends, who believed in this project and listened to me talk about it, and those who celebrated the wins, big and small, along the way – including Emma Cleave, Mel Bradman, Lucy Ward, Faith Rose and Max Geller, Ruth Spedding and Jasmine F. Clark.
My mother, Pamela, read a million drafts, offered feedback, and boosted my confidence throughout every stage of this process. As a child, I remember you writing late into the night, and I’m so happy that your passion for reading and storytelling has passed on to me. To my father, Peter – printing out an early draft and reading it (perhaps the first book you’d read for decades) meant so much. How happily you highlighted my typos! And I’m grateful for the enthusiasm shown by my siblings, extended family and family-in-law. Your curiosity and care about this process have meant the world.
A gigantic thank-you to my husband, James, who fuels everything good in my world. This book couldn’t exist without you, simply because I would not exist. You offered ceaseless support, elaborate sustenance and deep love at every step. I appreciate every single thing.
I also want to say how grateful I am to the followers of the Instagram account @egonschieleswomen, who are engaged, enthusiastic and enamoured with the work of Egon Schiele and the stories of his models.
Finally, thank you to you, the readers, who have picked up this book. I hope you look at the women in the frames in a new and lasting light.
THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING
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First published in Great Britain in 2022 by Doubleday
Copyright © Sophie Haydock 2022
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Cover Design and illustration by Beci Kelly/TW
Cover images © Getty
This book is a work of fiction. Some names, characters, places and organizations are based on real people and real settings, but all other characters, incidents and descriptions of events are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons is entirely coincidental.
Illustrations by Egon Schiele: p. 9 Leemage/UIG via Getty Images; p. 111 photo by Imagno/Getty Images; p. 225 Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images; p. 329 and p. 423 photos by V. C. G. Wilson/Corbis via Getty Images.
Extract from ‘Ariel’ by Sylvia Plath on p.vii reproduced by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.
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ISBN: 978-1-473-58869-1
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Sophie Haydock, The Flames
