Ida Nettleship was a flamboyant Bohemian who gave up a promising artistic career to marry Augustus John. She had five pregnancies in just six years, lived with Augustus and his mistress in a ménage à trois, and died exhausted in childbirth aged thirty. Ida’s story of unconventional love is equalled by two other Bohemian women of the same era: Picasso’s first love Fernande Olivier, who was prominent in the Paris art scene, and the writer Sophie Brzeska, who lived with the artist Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, nineteen years her junior ‒ he would die in the First World War and Sophie’s slow descent into mental instability would begin.

Bohemian Lives follows the achievements and sacrifices of the three women and how their lives overlapped and contrasted, in education, childbirth, illness, marriage ‒ and psychological disintegration. All three women had a huge influence on their more famous partner and challenged the accepted model of male–female relations of the time. At once touching and harrowing, their struggles for recognition in their own right hold a mirror up to the prejudices of an age – and what being ‘bohemian’ really meant.

• Author of the acclaimed 'Living In Squares, Loving In Triangles: The Lives and Loves of the Bloomsbury Group'.
• Three women with private lives decades ahead of their time
• Compelling lives and famous lovers: artists Augustus John, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Picasso
• Illustrates challenges facing women in the early 20th century
• Includes the first in-depth account of Ida John, whose letters were recently published, edited by Sir Michael Holroyd