For 2019 Q4, bxwbc is taking on a biography of a different kind: Cleopatra: A Life, by Stacy Schiff (selected by me, Laila, of the Honolulu chapter). As Schiff’s website attests, Cleopatra is “one of the most intriguing women in the history of the world.” And what a complicated web of historical / sociocultural / psychological intrigue it is. Apparently Cleopatra’s first biographers started writing about her roughly a full century after her death, and those who did first act to record the events of her life for posterity did so with big chips on their shoulders.
I haven’t read the book yet, but what I get from Kathryn Harrison’s book review is: Schiff posits that the widely-held understanding of Cleopatra (“the snare, the delusion, the seductress”) is less truth and more myth—sculpted by and suited for the poets, historians, and biographers for whom “citing her sexual prowess was evidently less discomfiting than acknowledging her intellectual gifts.” Because Cleopatra was such a powerful woman, and because this was so difficult for some egos to accept, her formidable reign would go down in history as “little more than a sustained striptease,” as Harrison succinctly states. It sounds like Schiff's book presents a history more complete, more gratifying.
Schiff was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for her first book, Saint-Exupery: A Biography; she won the Pulitzer in 2000 for her second book, a biography entitled Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov); and she has received a handful of other prestigious recognitions, all of which make me think that this Schiff knows what she is doing.
We’ve actually read a fair amount of auto/biographical works in bxwbc: Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater, Janet Mock’s Redefining Realness, and Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do. But depending on how similar or different this biography’s style is to that of Lucy Worsley’s Jane Austen at Home, this may turn out to be bxwbc’s first foray into the nitty gritty of history.
And, wild fact—though we associate Cleopatra heavily with the most recognizable emblems of very ancient Egyptian history (i.e. the Sphynx, the pyramids, and kohl-rimmed eyes à la Elizabeth Taylor), Cleopatra actually lived closer in time to the first moon landing than to the time that the Pyramids of Giza were built!!
On top of all this, I think it will be interesting for our feminist book club to take into account how our own feminist identities may inform the ways we will come to understand Cleopatra, how history has held her, and the ways in which Schiff upholds, challenges, or transforms that. (~Premonitions of cultural relativism challenges here~)
If you want to listen the audiobook or read the ebook for free, check to see if it’s in your local public library’s collection through the app, Libby, which I love so much. That way, if it’s available, you can read or listen to it right from your phone for free and support your local library at the same time.
The other week when I visited Val and saw that Cleopatra was one of 30+ books that she hadn’t packed or shipped before her move because she might—quote—need to read them in the next week—I took it as a sign that this book, out of the few I was trying to decide between, should be our one. Happy reading!