Flutterby™! : The Painted Kiss

Although many weeks there's nothing there that I'd bother with, I've entered my name in the Great American Book Giveaway a couple of times, and one of those times was told I'd won a copy of Elizabeth Hickey's historical novel, The Painted Kiss. Set in late 1800 and early 1900s Vienna, it's an imagining of the relationship between the painter Gustav Klimt and Emilie Flöge. Klimt was a successful painter in the Symbolist style who died of a stroke, his last words were apparently her name.

I can't evaluate it from a historical perspective, I did recognize Alma Maria Schinder Mahler Gropius Werfel, mostly from the Tom Lehrer song, but even Klimt was someone I had to go look up on the net. However, in the the end-notes Elizabeth Hickey mentions where she kept to history, where she changed things for story pacing, and where she had no information and imagined what it could have been.

It was a decent read, nicely captured the feel of an era and a society and the introspection of two people who wanted a relationship that couldn't happen because of who each of them was.