Pulled straight from the canvasses of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Elizabeth Hickey’s The Wayward Muse paints a vivid portrait of the mysterious and beautiful Jane Burden, the Pre-Raphaelite icon.

A stableman’s daughter raised in the slums of Oxford, England, seventeen-year-old Jane is convinced of her own homeliness. But her fortunes forever change when she is discovered by the charismatic and irreverent painter, Rossetti. Jane is swept into the artist's world as model and muse and falls madly in love with him. When Rossetti abruptly leaves her, Jane reluctantly agrees to marry his protégé, a shy craftsman named William Morris. But her passion for Rossetti never dies, and years later all three become entangled in a love triangle from which they will never escape.

In the tradition of The Girl with the Pearl Earring and The Girl in Hyacinth Blue, a beautiful, atmospheric, and sensual debut re-imagines the tempestuous relationship between painter Gustav Klimt and Emilie Flöge, the youngest daughter of a bourgeois businessman.

"In Elizabeth Hickey's compelling novel of tempestuous lives amid the tawdry bohemia of artists' studios and the glittering innuendo of Viennese café society, longing pulses from the page. The Painted Kiss is vivid, atmospheric, engaging, and very, very real." --Susan Vreeland, author of Girl In Hyacinth Blue

"The Painted Kiss is richly atmospheric and haunting." --Lauren Belfer, author of City of Light