Love, trust, and sisterhood

Recommending The Flames by Sophie Haydock

Apr 29, 2025

If you’ve read my two recent posts about sisters involved in the life of artist Egon Schiele – the Harms sisters and the Schiele sisters – you’ll be familiar with the characters in this excellent novel by Sophie Haydock. She’s writing at the literary end of historical fiction in The Flames, and this is a rich and clever novel with an interesting structure and timeline.

Be aware that what follows includes spoilers, but only to the extent that if you’ve read my prior posts or have familiarity with Schiele’s biography, you’ll know he courted both Adele and Edith Harms, and it was Edith he chose to marry. With that in mind, let’s talk structure.

First, there’s a framing narrative. In May 1968, an accident brings a young woman, Eva, into contact with a much older women who is angry and confused. Her name is Adele Harms. Haydock returns to Eva and Adele at the end of the book, and for brief visits in between its five substantial sections, each of which covers aspects of Schiele’s short life from a different point of view.

Part One belongs to Adele, aged 22 in 1912, who we meet gazing out of the window of her family’s apartment, longing to meet a man she has watched moving his belongings into the building opposite. She’s a feisty character, something she’s proudly aware of, and considers draws a sharp contrast between herself and her younger sister Edith, who Adele loves, despite dismissing her as plain and dull. Adele longs for romance and marriage, but not the kind her middle-class parents enjoy. She's already broken off one engagement, but this young man across the road, this artist with a notorious reputation? He’s exactly the kind of man Adele wants. When things don’t work out the way she expects, however, Adele reacts…badly.

In Part Two, the story moves back to 1899. This is the point of view of Gertrude, or Gerti, Egon Schiele’s younger sister. When this section begins, she is only five years old. Egon, her brother, is nine. Here the reader learns about their strange and difficult childhood, and their intense relationship. We follow Gerti right up to August 1914, when she and her brother stand in his apartment window:

Gertrude pauses, glancing out of the bay window. She sees two women leaving the building opposite.
“Make yourself known to them, why don’t you?” Gertrude suggests.
Egon peers down. “The Harms sisters,” he says. “The darker haired one is a little intense. The blonde is easier to be around.”

Next comes Vally – Walburga Neuzil, often also called Wally – Egon Schiele’s mistress and early muse. Her story is one of my favorites in the novel. She first meets the artist in 1911 and her narrative perhaps brings us closest to knowing Egon Schiele. The overarching question of the truth about his relationships with the two Harms sisters is less pressing in this section, but Vally’s unremitting concern for her own sisters is an effective reminder of, and counterpoint to, the central sister relationship in the book.

After Vally’s story concluded I was very ready for Edith’s take on events and her section opens on her wedding day. Does Edith feel guilty, knowing Adele wanted Schiele but taking him for herself? Here’s a taste of Edith:

Adele found the artist handsome, but Edith had caught glimpses of something deeper in him that her sister failed to grasp: a sensitivity in the way he considered things, his gentleness when he was around her, his way of looking at the world, as she’d witnessed at the gallery. All the other suiters her mother kept trying to press upon her paled in comparison. Edith felt guilty about betraying Adele, and she didn’t want to hurt her, but why should she allow her sister to claim Egon just because she’d seen him first?

I’m reluctant to talk more about the events in the book, even though my copy is covered in sticky tabs noting sisterly interactions I found fascinating. Edith’s section takes the reader to October 1918 and frames her death firmly within the context of the sister relationship. It’s very well done - and that’s all I’m saying about that. All that’s left when Edith’s story is complete, is to bring the reader into one final short section from the point of view of Egon Schiele himself. I am really teetering on the brink of spoiler-dom here and hope subscribers will want to read The Flames, so if you want to find out how the book concludes with Egon and the wrap up of the framing narrative, well yes, you’re going to have to read it yourself.

Although complex, the shifting timelines and perspectives employed in the novel are highly effective. Adele believes she’s the object of Schiele’s attention but it’s always Edith. I love an unreliable narrator and there’s no doubt Adele is one of those – and if she’s deluded before the marriage, perhaps she’s equally deluded in 1917/18, when Egon and Edith return to Vienna, and she becomes his model. Or is she? Another character (read the book to find out which!) also assumes Adele is the sister the artist must have married and is surprised when Edith is his choice. That certainly gave me much to think about. If I have one niggle it’s that the portrait flapping I wrote about isn’t in the story! I’d love to ask Sophie Haydock why not!

There’s a school of thought in historical biographical fiction, that suggests the writer learn all the facts and then fills in any gaps in a way that makes sense. Haydock takes a different tack. She illuminates the unknowns in the Schiele/Harms story, but she doesn’t provide her own answers. The truth of the relationships between Schiele and the Harms sisters, for me at least, remains ambiguous at the end of The Flames. Ambiguity isn’t one of my go-to compliments when writing book reviews, but in this case, it’s integral to the novel’s success. Sophie Haydock lets us know what each of her characters believes happened, but in this fiction, as in life, fact and belief are two very different animals.

So what are we left with? I found myself very much in agreement with Edith. Edith who:

…knows her sister; knows her sensitivities, her weaknesses, her bad side and the good. Edith understands the part she has played in cultivating the person Adele has become. She’s sorry too, for everything.

And that means:

There’s only one choice Edith can make, that much is clear: to believe in love.
For without it, we are nothing.

I’m genuinely excited that Sophie Haydock has a new book out, Madame Matisse, featuring three key women in Matisse’s life - his wife, his daughter, and Lydia Delectorskya. According to my reading of the Dictionary of Artist’s Models, Lydia is a character not to be missed! Here she is: