Marianne Ihlen has the rare distinction of having been muse to not one, but two famous men. She figures in the novels of writer Axel Jensen, with whom she moved from Oslo to the Greek island of Hydra in 1957, when she was 22. Two years later, Jensen abandoned the couple’s brief marriage shortly after their son was born. A not-quite-famous Montreal poet named Leonard Cohen – who had just arrived on the island and was immediately smitten with Marianne – readily stepped up, and the two embarked on a romantic relationship that endured for almost a decade.

Kari Hesthamar’s slim volume (originally published in Norwegian in 2008, and appearing in English via a seamless translation by Helle V. Goldman) takes us from Marianne’s Oslo adolescence to her amicable breakup with Cohen in the late 1960s, when his music career took off. Though Cohen doesn’t show up until the halfway point, So Long, Marianne will appeal primarily to his legion of die-hard fans wanting to fill in biographical gaps and read some of his previously unpublished poems. Yet the book’s great delight is Hesthamar’s sun-drenched evocation of life in Hydra during the years of its transformation into a Bohemian idyll for poets, painters, and musicians from around the world.

Much of Marianne’s allure was her striking Nordic beauty, which is apparent in the book’s lovely photos. That she was a good housekeeper who silently endured both men’s infidelities apparently helped, too. Having forgone a career for love, Marianne was reliant on the book advances that fuelled the lives of her men. Where Axel was a spiritually restless alcoholic prone to fiery bouts of temper, Cohen – true to legend – was placid, gentlemanly, and a loving surrogate father to Marianne’s son.

Hesthamar gives wonderful insights into the genesis of some of Cohen’s work. (“Bird on the Wire” was his response to the sight of Hydra’s first telephone lines.) Bizarrely, though, there is no mention of the song that immortalized Marianne and serves as the book’s title. Missing, too, is a sense of Marianne’s own voice; though the book is based on original interviews, Hesthamar sticks almost entirely to the third person.

Leaping from the page are the era’s gender hypocrisies: her globetrotting lovers’ imprecations that Marianne be “free” and “find herself” while under the constraints of single motherhood often seem like self-serving blindness.