Top nine writers' muses

Simon Gough is a former actor and antiquarian bookseller. The White Goddess: An Encounter, the fictional retelling of the extraordinary events surrounding his relationship with his "Grand Uncle" Robert Graves, is his first novel.

One of his top nine muses, as told to the Guardian:

F Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Fitzgerald

Hemingway loathed Zelda Fitzgerald, claiming that she was an anti-muse to her husband, "constantly making him drink because she was jealous of his working well". But Zelda was one of Fitzgerald's most powerful inspirations. His tragic, flawed masterpiece Tender is The Night is not only about her, and for her, but even partly written by her, since Fitzgerald was famously keen on including excerpts from her diaries in his writing. Given the choice between the bombastic Hemingway and the flawed but touchingly sensitive Fitzgerald, I'd have left them both to sort it out, and invited Zelda out to dinner.

Read about the other muses on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue