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Author Mary Sharratt has a mission: " Writing women back into history." In 2012 she focused on 12th-century Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen in ILLUMINATIONS, showing us a woman expected from a young age to submit herself quietly to God but who refused to lose her identity completely and was a composer, herbalist, mathematician and feminist of her times. In 2016 I read THE DARK LADY'S MASK about Aemilia Bassano Lanier, writer and poet, believed to be William Shakespeare's love and an unrecognized collaborator on several of his plays.

Now Sharratt has turned her attention to early-1900s Vienna and Alma Schindler, daughter of famous artist Emil Schindler. Alma is beautiful and musically talented. Men are drawn to her. She received her first kiss from Gustav Klimt. Max Burckhard, Joseph Olbrech, Felix Muhr and others flirted with her, some may have proposed marriage. Alexander von Zemlinsky was one of her musical mentors and her first serious love, whom she might have married if not for two reasons: (1) He was too poor to please her mother, and (2) She met more famous Gustav Mahler and was overwhelmed by him.

So somewhat star-struck, Alma chose to marry Mahler, even knowing that he, unlike Zemlinsky, who encouraged her talent, would expect her to have only one profession after marriage: "...to make me happy...You must surrender yourself to me unconditionally." And she does. But from then on we watch Alma suffer and lament her choices. Sharratt has done extensive research to write this story of Alma's unsatisfying, artistically-suppressed life with Mahler. Not only using information from biographies, she has also mined the words of the two main characters themselves in Gustav Mahler's LETTERS TO HIS WIFE and Alma's 1940 memoir, GUSTAV MAHLER: MEMORIES AND LETTERS, in particular.

Using all this research, Sharratt has painted an extremely detailed picture of 1900s Vienna and the world of music and the arts. This makes for an interesting read. What doesn't work for me is the tediousness of having to listen to Alma's laments and complaints over and over, time after time. We are supposed to believe that her dissatisfaction is the result of unfulfilled dreams of artistic growth and professional recognition. And, yes, there was the legitimate complaint that Mahler did not take her talents seriously, but the whinging woe-is-me attitude that came across in this book was more a "boo-hoo, he doesn't really love me enough or appreciate me and all I do for him."

And he didn't. He was an egotistical, self-absorbed man. When he ignored Alma, she was unhappy and looked for attention elsewhere. When he noticed her, she wasn't and didn't. This felt not so much like artistic dissatisfaction as personal love life dissatisfaction as presented in Sharratt's story.

This book basically ends with the death of Mahler, followed by a very few pages sketching her later life and artistic endeavors. Mahler died in 1911. Alma died in 1964. I would have enjoyed reading more extensively about Alma's years when she was no longer living in Mahler's shadow, the time when she seemed to come into her own. As it is, this book dwells so long on the Alma-Mahler relationship that it often felt more like a melodramatic romance novel than historical biographical fiction.