Mothers of invention

The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women and the Artists They Inspired, by Francine Prose. New York: HarperCollins. 416 pages. $24.95.

Much ballyhoo was made about Francine Prose's rabble-rousing essay "Scent of a Woman's Ink" when it appeared in Harper's in 1998. In it, the widely published Prose (critic, essayist, author of thirteen books of fiction) bemoaned the dearth of critical attention and literary accolades bestowed on women writers. "Are women writers really inferior?" she asked. Hardly, she answered, and subsequently went about leveling the literary playing field, proving that women can write unsentimental, "hard-boiled" fiction as well as-if not often better than-men. …