Janet Warner’s Other Sorrows, Other Joys will please three kinds of readers. New Age enthusiasts will like the novel’s description of Blake’s ecstasies; poetry and art lovers will delight in the accounts of his creative process; and romance readers will swoon over the novel’s love stories set in England and France at the end of the 18th century. Warner uses a mixture of notes from an imaginary diary by Catherine Blake and memories from the end of her life, Blake’s poetry, and letters from such friends as Mary Wollstonecraft to tell of the Blakes’ struggles with emotion, poverty, art – and each other.

Warner is the author of a scholarly work, Blake and the Language of Art. While researching that book, she wondered what it must have been like to be wife to such genius. Victorians, she notes, thought Catherine Blake (Kate) a “perfect wife” because of her docility and support for her husband. Warner, however, saw “evidence of marital jealousy and strife” in Blake’s poetry. From that and from the few quotes from Kate that have survived (“I have very little of Mr. Blake’s company. He is always in Paradise.”) she concocted her tale.

Kate was the illiterate daughter of a farmer, but she became both Blake’s skilled helper in his engraving shop and an artist of some talent. In short factual biographies of the characters at the end of the book, Warner notes that the Blakes were thought to be devoted to each other over 45 years of marriage. Nevertheless, she invents many affairs for Blake and a smoldering, long-lived romance with a French revolutionary for Kate.

These stories, along with some flim-flammery about forged engravings, are the novel’s narrative engine. This is a shame. While many of the novel’s individual scenes are brilliant, Warner gives us a plot-driven narrative that fails to do justice to Blake’s mystic genius or to the strength and vision that his wife and collaborator required.