Charmian Clift (second from left), Leonard Cohen (second from right), members of the Katsikas family, and others, c. 1960 (Johnston and Clift Collection)

The fictional Erica – sweet, shy, consumed by grief, searching for purpose, alive to all the beauty and sexual intrigue of the island – is Samson’s way in to exploring the myths and legends of the real-life expatriate artists of Hydra in the 1960s. Clift unofficially adopts Erica as she adopted many stray artists, poets and hangers-on who passed through her household, where she and her husband, the writer George Johnston, held court in the burgeoning island community of aspiring artists. Twenty-five-year-old Leonard Cohen arrives at around the same time, flirts with everyone, and begins an affair with the beautiful, married Marianne Jensen.

With its promise of escape, A Theatre for Dreamers might be the perfect book for these coronavirus times, but it also speaks to a potentially relatable sense of confinement. Hydra is a paradise, a source of inspiration for free, wandering spirits, but it is also a place of misery for those trapped by financial circumstances (George Johnston, broke, desperately ill, and driven to publish for money when the concept is anathema); by commitment to family at the expense of art (Clift, who cares for her husband and their three children, along with others who swing into their orbit); or by abasement to an ideology of feminine servitude (Marianne, tortured by marriage to an unfaithful husband and subsequent dedication to a careless Cohen).

The setting is poised just on the brink of the second wave of feminism; an older Erica reflects that 1960 is ‘in reality half a decade before the sixties began’. The pill isn’t yet available. Women like Clift who question male domination in art and life are the exception to the rule. Samson explores the tensions within unequal relationships between men and women, these male geniuses and their downtrodden muses, who double as domestic servants.

Samson brilliantly conjures the atmosphere of the island, the crumbling, majestic structures, the landscape in all its seasonal wonder. Erica describes a night where the artist ‘colony’ gathers around the charcoal grill at the local tavern: ‘This evening has been born from one of those murmuring sundowns, our bodies molten as the sea and the sky turned to honey. We’ve been dipping and diving and drying off in the sun all afternoon. The night-scented jasmine is soporific as a lullaby.’ So many details feel perfectly rendered: the crusty salt of Erica’s hair as it dries, everyone barefoot in the warm night. There is occasionally a laboured, documentary feel to these scenes, as every figure of cultural significance is name-checked at any given dinner party, but this is redeemed by the loveliness of Samson’s prose.

The moments of truest feeling come in the form of Clift’s fury at her own circumstances, such as when she confesses her reaction to Cohen’s enquiry about a place to write. ‘You know, that nice young Canadian poet earlier, when he asked me if I knew of a room, a nice simple room, he said, with maybe a bed and a desk and a chair? I was jealous, so jealous that for a moment I actually hated him. Imagine what I would get done, I thought, at a table in that little white room with nothing but my typewriter for company.’ But she has no room of her own, and her husband has ‘Fuck Virginia Woolf’ emblazoned above his own writing table.

For the reader familiar with the tragic story of the Clift– Johnston family, these moments are shadowed by the knowledge of what is to come. There is a painful asymmetry to the way the novel serves, on the one hand, as a beautifully illustrated background to some of Cohen’s most famous songs, and, on the other, as a suggestive guide to Clift’s deep emotional agony.

At the end of the story, an older Marianne reflects that ‘our children paid the price for our freedom’. It sounds like a cliché, and also like an understatement. I grew up surrounded by the next generation of writers, including Clift and Johnston’s son Martin. I remember him as an exception to the brash egotism of most of those types: extraordinarily gentle, shadowed by an aura of damage. In the few moments he appears in the margins of the story as a skinny child, Samson captures his quick brilliance, his shyness and sensitivity. I was the age of young Erica when Martin drank himself to death with solemn, dedicated effort, aged forty-two.

For Erica, imagining herself as Clift’s daughter is a kind of game that she plays at, and then can choose to put aside, so very unlike Clift’s actual children. This feels to me like a thing that the novel struggles to accommodate, invested as it is in the romance and tragedy of Clift’s own particular self-destruction.