The Muse's Memoir

Most of the muses on this show get erased once the artist's interest moves on. Marianne Ihlen didn't - Leonard Cohen kept singing the song with her actual name in the title for the rest of his life, and stayed practically supportive of her for decades after their relationship on the Greek island of Hydra ended. This episode traces their decade together, the myth around Cohen's real final letter to her as she was dying in 2016, and how differently this story turns out compared to most of what we cover here.More on Suzanne Verdal - the other woman on that same first album, and a very different kind of muse story - over on Substack at themusesmemoir.substack.com.Memoir House Productions also makes The Fashion Memoir (fashion history) and The Fragrance Memoir (perfume history), with The Motoring Memoir (motoring history) also part of the network.

Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West met at a London dinner party in December 1922 - both married, both already writers, and neither expecting much to come of it. By the mid-1920s they were deeply involved, and in 1928 Woolf published Orlando, a novel modelled directly on Vita and her family home, Knole - the house Vita loved and, as a woman, could never legally inherit. This episode traces how two working writers inspired each other in a relationship that doesn't fit the usual "artist and muse" mold: their unconventional marriages, the writing of Orlando, the slow cooling of the romance into a decades-long friendship, and Woolf's death in 1941. More on Vita's earlier, scandal-prone affair with Violet Trefusis over on Substack at themusesmemoir.substack.com.