Mad, bad, and dangerous to know: Three historical novels

Emma Donoghue. Image source: The Idle Woman

Jorge Luis Borges' 1939 story "Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote" brilliantly illustrates the impossibility of writing historical fiction without anachronism. After a vast number of rough drafts and "thousands of manuscript pages" Pierre Menard produces a fraction of Cervantes' Don Quixote: "the ninth and thirty-eighth chapters of Part One, and a fragment of the twenty-second chapter." In the translation of Anthony Bonner,

He did not want to compose another Don Quixote—which would be so easy—but the Don Quixote. It is unnecessary to add that his aim was never to produce a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable ambition was to produce pages which would coincide—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes. . .

'To compose Don Quixote at the beginning of the seventeenth century was a reasonable, necessary and perhaps inevitable undertaking; at the beginning of the twentieth century it is almost impossible. It is not in vain that three hundred years have passed, charged with the most complex happenings—among them, to mention only one, that same Don Quixote'. . .The text of Cervantes and that of Menard are verbally identical, but the second is infinitely richer. [1]

As Borges' droll thought-experiment demonstrates, a present-day novel set in the past, even if it is impeccably accurate, is inflected anachronistically with both the author's and reader's knowledge of the intervening history, and with our experience of vastly different cultures (both material and non-material), sensibilities and conventions. When such a novel introduces inaccuracies of diction or fact, the sense of falsity is heightened.

So with the understanding that anachronism in the genre is unavoidable (but also has degrees), below I comment on three historical novels. Each of the three novels has a female protagonist, who could be described respectively by the three adjectives in Lady Caroline Lamb's description of Lord Byron: "mad, bad, and dangerous to know."

Mad: Margaret Cavendish of Margaret the First

Cover of Margaret the First by Danielle Dutton, Catapult, 2016. Image source: Catapult Books

. . .I am not covetous, but as ambitious as ever any of my sex was, is, or can be; which is the cause, that though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second; yet, I will endeavour to be, Margaret the First: and, though I have neither power, time nor occasion, to conquer the world as Alexander and Caesar did; yet, rather than not to be mistress of one, since Fortune and the Fates would give me none, I have made a world of my own. . .

—Margaret Cavendish, "To The Reader," in The Description of a New World,
called The Blazing World (1666) [2]

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, lived during a time of cataclysmic social upheaval. As Margaret Lucas, a maid of honor to Queen Henrietta Maria during the English Civil War, at age 21 in 1644 she went with the queen into French exile. There Margaret met and married William Cavendish, Marquess (later Duke) of Newcastle-on-Tyne; he was a recently widowed Royalist general and 30 years her senior.  

Seven years into their marriage Margaret began to write and publish books under her own name, which was highly unusual for the time. What was also quite unusual was that her writing had the full support and financial backing of her husband. In his prefatory poem to The Blazing World, after comparing her to Columbus, who "only discovered" a new world, he wrote of his wife, "But your creating Fancy, thought it fit / To make your World of Nothing, but pure Wit." Ultimately Margaret produced a dozen volumes of poetry, plays, romances, utopian fantasies, philosophical essays, biography and autobiography.

After the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 Margaret became a well-known figure in London, and was the first woman to attend a meeting of the Royal Society. Crowds would gather at her public appearances; she was nicknamed "Mad Madge" for her eccentricities in dress, behavior, and thought. Samuel Pepys described her in his diary as "a mad, conceited, ridiculous woman," and Dorothy Osborne wrote in a letter to Sir William Temple that "there are many soberer people in Bedlam." In the 20th century, Virginia Woolf wrote of her that "there is something noble and Quixotic and high-spirited, as well as crack-brained and bird-witted, about her." [3] 

Of course, women have always been under greater pressure to conform to social expectations, with contempt and ridicule among the milder punishments for overstepping their bounds. As Kate Lilley writes in her introduction to The Blazing World and Other Writings, "the number of substantial, elaborately produced books she wrote and published under her own name and at considerable expense, in a career spanning twenty years, constituted her most radical and deliberate infringement of contemporary proprieties." [4]

"Margaret Daughter to Thos. Lucas Esqr. of Essex 2d. wife to Wm. Duke of Newcastle," portrait by Peter Lely, 1665. Image source: Wikimedia Commons

Danielle Dutton's slim novel Margaret the First recounts Margaret's story from her own perspective. She is portrayed as prefiguring our time in multiple ways: a proto-feminist writer of fantasy fiction unconstrained by traditional gender expectations (Cavendish described The Blazing World as "hermaphroditic" and on occasion wore men's clothes, like the disguised character "Travellia" in her novella "Assaulted and Pursued Chastity" (1656)). The novel does not attempt to delve deeply into Margaret's psychology, but portrays her largely through her extravagant self-presentation.

To give the flavor of the book, here is Margaret relating her reception among the Dutch (she and her husband moved to Antwerp in 1648):

To my growing delight, I was a hit, my mind, I wrote, a "swarm of bees." That August I cast off my years of mourning, sent maids scurrying down the halls with stacks of black gowns in their arms. To the final parties of the season I wore a rainbow of new dresses I'd had made—one bright as a fiery beam, one as green as leaves. "After all," I told my husband, "dressing is the poetry of women." He heartily agreed. Had I heard it somewhere? I couldn't say. I took to wearing feathered hats like ladies in the streets. (p. 56)

This scene occurs in August 1649. However, Margaret would have been unlikely to don colorful, festive dresses little more than six months after the trial and execution of Charles I, and only five months after her husband's estates had been confiscated. 

By the way, the word "hit" employed to mean "a popular success" dates from the early 19th century, not the mid-17th. Danielle Dutton, doubtless, does not care. Her project is to bring Margaret into our time, rather than transport the reader into hers—to recuperate "Mad Madge" as a genderqueer literary pioneer. But I confess that I find Margaret's voice and thoughts as expressed in her writing to be far more strange and wonderful than Dutton's imagined version of her.

Bad: Mary Saunders of Slammerkin

Cover of Slammerkin by Emma Donoghue, Virago, 2000. Image source: Delphine Woods

In her 2001 New York Times review of Slammerkin, Laura Jamison wrote that it was "a heady, colorful romp of a novel." Um, no. A "colorful romp" makes it sound like a female version of Tom Jones; instead Slammerkin is more like a version of William Hogarth's "The Harlot's Progress" from the perspective of its doomed heroine Moll Hackabout.

Donoghue, a scholar of literature and sexuality, knows her historical setting (her Passions Between Women and Inseparable were two of my favorite books of 2022), and the novel is based on an actual 1764 trial. The title is an 18th-century term with a double meaning, both "a loose gown" and "a slovenly [with the additional implication of unchaste] woman." But Donoghue wears her learning lightly. She writes with all the fierce energy of her 14-year-old protagonist's yearnings, and brings both 18th-century London and her flawed heroine to vivid, visceral life.

Was it any wonder, then, that she preferred to dawdle away the last of the afternoon at the Dials, where seven streets thrust away in seven different directions, and there were stalls heaped with silks, and live carp butting in barrels, and gulls cackling overhead, and the peddler with his coats lined with laces and ribbons of colours Mary could taste on her tongue: yellow like butter, ink black, and the blue of fire? Where boys half her size smoked long pipes and spat black on the cobbles, and sparrows bickered over fragments of piecrust? Where Mary couldn't hear her own breath over the thump of feet and the clatter of carts and the church bells, postmen's bells, fiddles and tambourines, and the rival bawls of vendors and mongers of lavender and watercress and curds-and-whey and all the things there were in the world? What d'ye lack, what d'ye lack? (p.8)

It's the allurements of the Seven Dials that are Mary's downfall: as she tries to purchase a red ribbon so that she can have something pretty in her life, the seller demands a kiss in exchange, and then backs her against a wall and rapes her. She becomes pregnant, and is thrown out of her house by her mother. She returns to the Seven Dials, but this time to become one of the girls walking the streets and luring cullies to survive. An (only slightly) older and (much) more experienced prostitute, Doll Higgins, shows her the ropes, and a fierce friendship develops.

Expelled from her family, Mary rejects them in turn:

Was that hard-hearted? Well, so what if it was. She'd been through enough to harden anyone. It was none of her choosing; all she'd done was clung on to her life like a spar from a shipwreck. Better to be hardened than crushed to nothing. (p. 84)

The simile of the shipwreck is perhaps a touch literary for the unspoken thought of the now 15-year-old Mary, but Donoghue makes few such missteps.

Although Doll and Mary watch out for each other, appalling things befall the pair, and soon Mary is forced to flee London and a murderous pimp. Although she reinvents herself in a remote town, finding work as a maid and seamstress, her past inevitably catches up with her.

The novel depicts the crushing social and economic forces and sexual double standards that ruled women's lives in the Georgian era. As a maid or a seamstress, Mary Saunders faces a life of unremitting toil. The 19th-century sociologist and reformer Harriet Martineau wrote that "prostitution is fed by constant accession from starved or overwearied dressmakers"; in seeking a better life Mary is trapped by her class and her gender. [5] 

Donoghue portrays Mary in all her complexity. She shows us that Mary is not only a victim; she has agency and makes choices, even if many of them are unwise, or bring harm to herself or others. Be forewarned: Mary's world, and her fate, are hard and grim.

Dangerous to know: Elizabeth Cree of The Trial of Elizabeth Cree

Cover of The Trial of Elizabeth Cree by Peter Ackroyd. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 1995. Image source: Internet Archive

Alfred Hitchcock's Stage Fright (1950) notoriously includes a flashback, narrated by one of the characters, that turns out to be false. Some viewers feel that the sequence violates an unwritten law of cinema: if we see something onscreen, it must actually happen in the world of the characters. However, Hitchcock signals from the opening credits, in which a stage curtain rises on a view of modern-day London, that the distinction between role-playing and real life is itself illusory. The film is also set in the world of the theater, and the two main characters are a famous actress (played by the famous actress Marlene Dietrich) and a drama student (Jane Wyman). As critic Robin Wood describes the film, "Acting is a leading motif: both women act parts continually and habitually, so that there is constant doubt about the real nature of each." [6] Or, I would say, the film suggests that our "real nature" is often malleable, unstable, and shaped by circumstances. Actors just visibly embody this truth that the rest of us strive to conceal.

Literature has a much longer tradition of unreliable narrators, of course. And particularly when a narrator (or even a character) is an actor—a professional dissembler—the reader must be on guard: disguises, false identities, and falsehoods are sure to follow.

Peter Ackroyd is a biographer (Dickens, 1990) and historian (London: The Biography, 2000) as well as a novelist. The Trial of Elizabeth Cree (to give the novel its U.S. title [7]) mixes real figures from 19th century London, such as Karl Marx, George Gissing, and the cross-dressing music-hall star Dan Leno, with Ackroyd's inventions. These include the title character, who in 1881 is hanged for killing her husband Jack by poisoning him with arsenic—not a spoiler, as the hanging occurs in the novel's first sentence—and a Jack-the-Ripper-like serial killer who mutilates his victims and creates gruesome tableaux with their body parts. There is a dual mystery in The Trial of Elizabeth Cree: who is the serial killer stalking the Limehouse district, and why does Elizabeth Cree murder her husband?

Be forewarned that Ackroyd describes the serial killer's murders, narrated in the first person, in grisly detail. There's a reason for the repellent relish with which the killings are described, as it obscures the identity of the murderer. But should you be tempted to read The Trial of Elizabeth Cree, I recommend skipping these sections unless you find entertainment in descriptions of torture and dismemberment.

For a historian, Ackroyd makes a number of surprising errors. Early in the novel, Jack Cree records in his diary a visit to the attic room of a prostitute:

There was a soiled mattress upon the floor, while on the walls she had pasted photographs of Walter Butt, George Byron and other idols of the stage. (p. 28)

This is an odd detail for Ackroyd to include. The entry is dated "September 6, 1880," but in 1880 it would be highly unlikely for an impoverished prostitute to own photographic prints. The photographs on the walls would had to have been cheap reproductions cut from newspapers or flyers. However, the mass reproduction of photographs on paper using the half-tone or rotogravure processes only became widespread after 1880; the first rotogravure newspaper supplements were published in the 1910s. [8]

It's possible that these could be photographic cartes de visite or cabinet cards bought at a photographer's or stationer's, which could feature actors or other public figures; in the Victorian era middle-class families collected these cards and preserved them in albums.

Dan Leno in female costume by William Davey, early 1900s, published by J. Beagles & Co. Image source: National Portrait Gallery London NPG Ax160245

However, such cards would seem to be beyond the means of a street prostitute: a Victorian advertisement lists the price of a cabinet card (about the size of a modern postcard) as three shillings, nearly a week's wage for a factory worker, while the smaller carte de visite cost a shilling and sixpence. It's very doubtful that an alcoholic prostitute barely surviving in a dismal garret and drinking her gin out of a chamberpot (!) would have such costly items pasted to the walls.

More egregious errors: "Dan Leno. . .was no longer the anxious young comic whom Lambeth Marsh Lizzie first met in 1864; now, sixteen years later, he was the established star of the halls who was billed as 'The Funniest Man on Earth'" (p. 168). Dan Leno might well have been anxious when onstage in 1864, as he was then only 3 years old; the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography gives his birth date as 20 December 1860. Elsewhere Lizzie describes him during their first rehearsals together as "only fifteen" (p. 108), but this is off by a dozen years. It's strange that Ackroyd, the author of histories of drag (Dressing Up, 1979) and the theater (The English Actor, 2023) should make such an easily-checked mistake.

Speaking of errors of chronology, in his diary entry for "September 26, 1880" Jack Cree records that "I went back to New Cross and listened to my wife playing a new tune by Charles Dibdin on the piano" (p. 192). A new tune by the prolific Dibdin would be remarkable indeed in 1880, since (according to the ODNB) he died in 1814; he was one of the favorite songwriters of Jane Austen.

"Let Bucks & let bloods to praise London a-gree / Oh the joys of the country my Jewel for me / Where sweet is the flow'r that the May bush adorns / And how charming to gather it but for the thorns. . ." Charles Dibdin's "The joys of the Country," from a manuscript of vocal music in Jane Austen's hand, copied c.1790–c.1805. Jane Austen House Museum CHWJA/19/3. Image source: Internet Archive

But my main objection to The Trial of Elizabeth Cree isn't the sloppiness of Ackroyd's evocation of its period. It's that Ackroyd exchanges the slow building of suspense (about how the lives of the serial killer and the other characters will intersect) for a surprise twist at the end (the killer isn't the character whom we've been led to believe). Perhaps this is Ackroyd's homage to Victorian melodramas and sensation novels, but I found it to be the final miscalculation in a disappointing book.

Ackroyd's novel has been adapted as a feature film, The Limehouse Golem (2016), starring no less an actor than Bill Nighy as the police inspector pursuing the murderer. It's also been adapted as an opera, Elizabeth Cree (2017), composed by Pulitzer-Prize-winning composer Kevin Puts with a libretto by Pulitzer- and Grammy-winning librettist Mark Campbell. Clearly, then, my negative reaction to the novel is not shared by everyone.

---

1. Jorge Luis Borges. Fictions. Edited and with an Introduction by Anthony Kerrigan. Calder & Boyars, 1974, pp. 42–51. UK edition of Ficciones, Grove Press, 1962.
2. Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World and Other Writings, Penguin, 2004, p. 124.
   
3. Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Wednesday 18 March 1667 [Old Style] / 1668 [New Style]; https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1668/03/18/; Dorothy Osborne, in Kingsley Hart, ed, Letters from Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, Folio Society, n.d., p. 58; Virginia Woolf, "The Duchess of Newcastle" in The Common Reader: First Series, Harcourt, Brace & World, p. 78. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.31822010374056&seq=92
4. Kate Lilley, "Introduction," in Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World and Other Writings, p. xi.
   
5. Harriet Martineau quoted in Samantha B. Vance, Revisiting Dickens, "Prostitution in Victorian Britain - Presentation Page." https://revisitingdickens.wordpress.com/prostitution-victorian/
6. Robin Wood, Hitchcock's Films Revisited. Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 80.
7. The U.K. title is Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem. The U.S. title seems a distinct improvement.
8. Rachel A. Mustalish, "The development of photomechanical printing processes in the late 19th Century," Topics in Photographic Preservation, Volume 7, Article 10, 1997, pp. 73-87. https://resources.culturalheritage.org/pmgtopics/1997-volume-seven/07_10_Mustalish.html; Library of Congress, "The Rotogravure Process," in Newspaper Pictorials: World War I Rotogravures, 1914 to 1919. https://www.loc.gov/collections/world-war-i-rotogravures/articles-and-essays/the-rotogravure-process/. By the way, "Walter Butt" and "George Byron" seem to be Ackroyd's inventions; I've been unable to trace any performers of those names in the 1870s.

January 20, 2025

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

Favorites of 2024: Books

Fiction Favorites of 2024

This week LitHub published a list of its editors' favorite stories of the past year. The first entry on the list was Bradford Morrow's "In Search of the Rarest Book in American Literature." You might suspect that first editions of Walt Whitman's self-published Leaves of Grass (1855), Herman Melville's Moby-Dick; or The Whale (1851), L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), or F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1928) in dust jacket would top the list of the rarest volumes in American letters, but no. While they are all extremely desirable (and costly), the rarest book in American literature is Edgar Allan Poe's 40-page-long first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), published in an edition of perhaps 50 copies when Poe was only 18.

Cover of Susan Jaffe Tane's copy of Edgar Allan Poe's Tamerlane (Calvin Thomas, 1827). Image source: Wikimedia Commons (erroneously identified there as the Cornell University Library copy)

Only eleven copies are known to have survived; a twelfth was stolen from the McGregor Room rare-book collection in the University of Virginia's Alderman Library in 1973 and may never be found.

One of the two known copies of Tamerlane in private hands recently came up for auction at Sotheby's. At the sale in June of this year Tamerlane was bought by the premier Poe collector today, Susan Jaffe Tane, who already owned the only other copy of Tamerlane in a private collection; she told Morrow that she plans to donate one of the two copies to "the right home."

The auction was the subject of Morrow's follow-up story, "What's worth more than the rarest book in American literature? The answer may (not) surprise you." As the title of Morrow's piece implies, Tamerlane, despite its rarity, did not sell for the highest price. In fact, though astronomically expensive, it was a relative bargain: when this copy had come up for auction in 2009 it had been bought by Dr. Rodney P. Swantko for $682,000 (the equivalent today of U.S. $1 million). But another item from Swantko's library sold for

a higher price than Poe’s Tamerlane ($420,000), a first edition of Melville’s Moby-Dick in the rare blue first binding ($21,600), a first issue of Leaves of Grass ($132,000), Lolita inscribed by Nabokov to Graham Greene with a butterfly drawing ($264,000), Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol inscribed to his close friend Walter Savage Landor in the year of publication ($228,000), The Great Gatsby in its rare and iconic dust jacket, gifted to Zelda’s sister and brother-in-law ($336,000), an inscribed first edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz ($108,000), Kerouac’s On the Road inscribed to [his lover] Joyce Johnson ($120,000), and the earliest known Poe autograph manuscript in private hands, "In an Album—to a River" ($216,000) combined.

The priciest item? Thomas Taylor's original cover art for the first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Bloomsbury, 1997), which sold for $1,920,000.

Thomas Taylor’s original cover illustration for Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Courtesy of Sotheby’s Books & Manuscripts Department. Image source: LitHub

I bring up Morrow's LitHub pieces because in them he mentions that he first met Tane while researching his 2020 novel The Forger's Daughter, "which centers on a complex scheme to counterfeit a thirteenth Tamerlane. . .[and] involves in-the-weeds details about Tamerlane's printing and hand-stitched binding."

Cover of Bradford Morrow's The Forger's Daughter (Mysterious Press, 2020). Image source: BradfordMorrow.com

This, I instantly thought, is a novel that I have to read. But The Forger's Daughter is the sequel to The Forgers (Mysterious Press, 2014), and so I thought I should read the series in order (the third and final volume, The Forger's Requiem, will come out in 2025).

Biggest disappointment

I picked up The Forgers in a state of high anticipation, and at the very first sentence was immediately dismayed. The book opens with a description of a gruesome murder scene: the victim, book collector Adam Diehl, has had his head crushed with a marble rolling pin and his hands severed. It's a graphic introduction to the bibliographic mystery I was expecting, and I felt my heart sinking at its generic conventionality. The novel also ends with a violent and bloody scene, and—although this doesn't necessarily destroy my enjoyment of a mystery—I was pretty sure I'd guessed the murderer on page 4. I turned out to be right.

Cover of Bradford Morrow's The Forgers (Mysterious Press, 2014). Image source: BradfordMorrow.com

But even more disappointing than the generic elements of the plot, the brutal but undermotivated violence, and an occasional "because the plot requires it" implausibility is the quality of the prose. Perhaps this was a deliberate attempt on Morrow's part to make his narrator sound like a real person, but I don't know anyone who speaks or writes like this, with one cliché thudding after another:

Once we're dead, secrets that we so carefully nurtured, like so many black flowers in a veiled garden, are often brought out in to the light where they can flourish. Cultivated by truth, fertilized by rumor, they blossom into florets and sprays that are toxic to those who would sniff their poisonous perfumes. While I did my best to shelter Meghan from certain unsavory discoveries that were made about her brother's life. . .some damning details would soon enough vine their strangling way into the light. Details that, as fate would have it, I had already surmised about Adam but could not before his death practically or honorably reveal to her. Details that I myself was duty bound to help transit from that darkness of secrecy into truth's awkward glare. Salt on the wound, I know, and yet it would prove to be an unavoidable seasoning. (p. 13)

So are secrets poisonous flowers, strangling vines, or salt on wounds? And should "vine" ever be used as a verb? And this is hardly the only passage of metaphor run wild. From just a few pages later:

. . .as in any vocation, those who truly love their work would embrace it with every fiber of their being even if there were nothing but a plug nickel at the rainbow's end. For me, the pot of gold was in the act itself, even if the act produced but fool's gold. (p. 25)

And yet the narrator is someone who is supposed to be able to produce forged inscriptions and letters by well-known and stylistically distinctive writers—in The Forger's Daughter he names "Henry James, Arthur Conan Doyle, W.B. Yeats" as his specialties—that are accepted as genuine by experts.

He also sprinkles his text with technical terms such as "holograph manuscript" (one in the author's handwriting) and "eidetic memory" (which before Photoshop commonly used to be called photographic memory). But here's his description of his parents' house in Irvington, New York:

A classic brick Tudor whose upper story was fashioned of white stucco with traditional wooden crisscross decoration. . . (p. 154)

Does our super-sophisticated narrator really not know the standard architectural term "half-timbered"?

Although The Forgers improves a bit when it focuses on the details of rare book collecting and dealing, it feels emblematic of the disappointing year it's been for me in fiction reading. So my apologies that the list of favorite fiction that follows is shorter than in some past years. In alphabetical order by author:

Alasdair Gray: Poor Things (1992)

Cover of the paperback of Alasdair Gray's Poor Things (Harcourt Brace, 1994).

It had been many years since I'd read Scottish writer Alasdair Gray's Poor Things, and so when I re-read it after seeing the Yorgos Lanthimos film it was like reading it anew. Poor Things is narrated by a Glaswegian doctor who describes reanimating a pregnant suicide victim by giving her a transplant of her own unborn baby's brain. He then describes "Bella"'s rapid mental development from infant to adult woman, and her traumatic encounters with exploitation, injustice, and man's inhumanity to man. It's a brilliant twist on the coming-of-age novel.

A minor caveat is necessary: the novel has one metafictional frame too many. Gray's "editorial" Notes Critical and Historical at the end of the book, after Bella/Victoria's own version of her story, are distinctly anticlimactic. Also, there is nothing in the text to indicate when there is an associated note, so if you read straight through you encounter the notes as a block. If Gray felt the notes were integral to the novel, they would have worked better as footnotes placed throughout the text than in their own 30-page section as endnotes.

Haruki Murakami: Manga Stories, Volume 1, adapted by Jean-Christophe Deveney, illustrations by PMGL (2021/2023)

Cover of Haruki Murakami's Manga Stories, Volume 1 (Tuttle, 2023).

Despite the title, these adaptations are actually bandes dessinées (French/Belgian comics) rather than manga (Japanese comics). Adapted by writer Jean-Christophe Deveney and artist PMGL (Pierre-Marie Grille-Liou), the stories contained in Volume 1 include "Super-Frog Saves Tokyo" (from after the quake, 2000/2002) and "Where I'm Likely To Find It," "Birthday Girl," and "Seventh Man" from Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (2009/2006).

Panels from "The Seventh Man."

As I wrote in my full review of Manga Stories, "Comics are a perfect medium for representing the sudden shifts in Murakami's fiction between everyday life and an alternate reality."

Volume 2, containing the stories "The Second Bakery Attack" (from The Elephant Vanishes, 2005/1993), "Samsa in Love" (Men Without Women, 2014/2017), and "Thailand" (after the quake), was issued this year. Volume 3, with "Scheherezade" (Men Without Women) and "Sleep" (The Elephant Vanishes) is scheduled for publication this spring. "Scheherezade" is one of the stories on which Ryūsuke Hamaguchi's film Drive My Car (2021) was based.

Zadie Smith: The Fraud (2023)

Cover of Zadie Smith's The Fraud (Penguin Random House, 2023).

The case of the Tichborne Claimant, a man who presented himself as the long-lost heir Roger Tichborne, fascinated 19th-century London. As I wrote in my full review of The Fraud, Zadie Smith "explores the idea of fraudulence as it relates to multiple characters, on stages both public and private. If you're wondering which character the title refers to, the answer is pretty much all of them."

The Tichborne Claimant, c. 1872. Photo credit: Maull & Co. Image source: National Portrait Gallery, Australia

The review went on, "The Fraud is almost compulsively readable. Its short chapters of, at most, a few pages—very un-Victorian—jump back and forth in time over the nineteenth century, and take place in both England and Jamaica. As expected and hoped-for from Zadie Smith, the novel is very much alive to the class, racial, and sexual dynamics of that time, and ours."

Fiction: Honorable mention

Emil Ferris, My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book Two (2024)

Cover of Emil Ferris's My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Book Two (Fantagraphics, 2024). Image source: Bookshop.org

Book One of My Favorite Thing Is Monsters came out in 2017, seven years after Ferris started working on it. Its long gestation was due in large part to the intricacy of its story and artwork, rendered as the sketchbook of its 10-year-old narrator Karen growing up in 1960s Chicago. Its many layers include Karen's own coming-of-age story, her homage to the horror comics that constitute her main reading, a diary of her mother's decline from cancer, and the slow uncovering of the mystery of the violent death of her Holocaust-survivor neighbor Anka.

As I wrote in my full review of Book One, "To encompass such a wide range of narrative registers and tones Ferris deploys an equally wide range of drawing styles: highly detailed and finely cross-hatched realism, comic-book fantasy, corrosive Weimar-style expressionism, dashed-off sketches, and renderings of famous artworks." The latter derive from her trips with her older brother Deez to the "art castle," the Art Institute of Chicago. Deez is hiding his own secrets, including his possible involvement in the events surrounding Anka's death.

Book Two was originally and optimistically scheduled for publication in October 2017. The publication date kept getting pushed back, and for some time no expected date was given at all. (It turned out that Ferris and her publisher Fantagraphics were involved in a lengthy legal dispute.) Finally issued last spring, Book Two picks up where Book One left off. It's 1968, and Karen is experiencing an awakening of both her sexual identity and her political consciousness. She participates in the tumultuous protests at the Democratic National Convention that are violently attacked by the Chicago police, and continues her investigation into Anka's death.

Panels from My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Book Two. Image source: Cărturești Carusel

The artwork is as rich and varied as in Book One. However, the storytelling felt less taut to me. The narrator keeps breaking off various subplots and saying that she'll return to give more detail later, and never does. Despite its 400-plus pages the book ends without any major new revelations, and with Deez and Karen planning a road trip. So clearly we can await My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Book Three. Let's hope it doesn't take seven more years to appear; given the transitional nature of this volume and the success of the series so far, there's a good chance that there's also a Book Four on the distant horizon.

Nonfiction Favorites of 2024

Jane Glover, Mozart in Italy (2023)

Jane Glover, Mozart in Italy: Coming of Age in the Land of Opera (Picador, 2023). Image source: The Hanbury Agency

Between the ages of 13 and 17 Mozart made three journeys to Italy with his father Leopold, and sought permanent employment there. Although during these journeys he composed his early operatic masterpieces Mitridate, re di Ponto (1770), Ascanio in Alba (1771), Lucio Silla (1772), and the sacred motet "Exsultate, Jubilate" (1773), all for Milan, he ultimately failed to find the court appointment he sought. Had he succeeded, the history of music would be profoundly different.

"Al destin che la minaccia" (From the fate that threatens me / Free, O God, my oppressed heart) sung by Yvonne Kenny accompanied by the Concentus Musicus Wien conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt, from the 1986 film of Mitridate directed by Jean-Pierre Ponelle:

https://youtu.be/s_gHjv3jZJ4

(For more on the opera and film, please see "'The insane frenzy of an illicit love': Mitridate, re di Ponto.")

In my review in Part 5 of my series Mozart in Italy, based on my reading of her book (and other sources), I wrote that although Glover sometimes opts for a simpler version of events rather than a more complex one, she "knows how to tell a good story, and Mozart in Italy—in which we see a teenaged musical genius trying to make his way in an adult world of politics, money, favoritism, and social and artistic hierarchies—is packed full of them."

Deirdre Le Faye, Jane Austen's 'Outlandish Cousin' (2002)

Cover of Deirdre Le Faye's Jane Austen's 'Outlandish Cousin': The Life and Letters of Eliza de Feuillide (British Library, 2002). Image source: Abebooks.com

Eliza Hancock, later de Feuillide, later Austen, was Jane Austen's cousin and sister-in-law: Eliza (after much hesitation) married Jane's brother Henry. She was born in India as the result of her mother's adulterous affair with Warren Hastings, who was the East India Company's Governor-General. Eliza was a flirtatious, pleasure-seeking, harp-playing, and theatrical-loving woman who lived a "gay," "dissipated," "racketing" life. She may have served as a model for several Austen characters, including the foundling Eliza of "Henry and Eliza" (ca. 1787), the attractive but self-interested and manipulative Lady Susan of Lady Susan (ca. 1794), the attractive but self-interested and manipulative Isabella Thorpe of Northanger Abbey (completed 1803, revised and published 1817), and especially the flirtatious, pleasure-seeking, harp-playing, theatrical-loving but self-interested Mary Crawford of Mansfield Park (1814).

Eliza never stopped flirting, even after her marriage to Henry Austen, then a militia officer. As she wrote to her cousin Philly Walter,

I have not yet given you any account of my brother officers of whom I wish you could judge in person for there are some with whom I think you would not dislike a flirtation—I have of course entirely left off trade but I can however discover that Captn. Tilson is remarkably handsome, and that Messrs. Perrott & Edwardes may be chatted with very satisfactorily, but as to my Colonel Lord Charles Spencer if I was married to my third husband instead of my second I should still be in love with him—He is a most charming creature[,] so mild, so well bred, so good, but alas he is married as well as myself and what is worse he is absent and will not return to us in less than a month.

As I wrote in my review of Jane Austen's 'Outlandish Cousin,' "Le Faye's book draws heavily on Eliza's letters to Philly Walter (as well as other sources) to tell the story of her life and its many intersections with the Austen family. As I hope the excerpts I've included show, Eliza's letters are thoroughly delightful and just a little bit wicked, as she must have been in life." And as I also wrote, Eliza lived to see the publication of Jane Austen's second novel, Pride and Prejudice (1813): "That novel features Jane's liveliest, wittiest, and most resolute heroine. Her name, of course, is Elizabeth."

Lucy Worsley, Jane Austen at Home (2018)

Cover of Lucy Worsley's Jane Austen at Home: A Biography, 250th Birthday Edition (Hodder & Stoughton, 2024). Image source: Jane Austen Centre, Bath

In my review of Jane Austen at Home I wrote that it is a "highly entertaining, vividly written, and deeply researched biography. . .one of the best biographies of Austen I've read. Her emphasis on Austen's different homes over the course of her itinerant life is a fascinating framework through which to view her experiences and her fiction. Worsley's book also silently corrects some errors in Claire Tomalin's Jane Austen: A Life, which on its publication in 1997 was widely regarded as the definitive Austen biography. Even if you've read Tomalin's excellent book, Worsley's Jane Austen at Home will provide many additional insights and pleasures."

Lucy Worsley: Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court (2010)

Cover of Lucy Worsley's Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court (Faber, 2010). Image source: Historic Royal Palaces

The King's Grand Staircase at Kensington Palace in London is lined with murals depicting 45 men, women, and children looking down over a railing at anyone climbing or descending the stairs. The mural's figures, painted by William Kent in the mid-1720s, are all thought to depict actual members of the royal households of George I and George II (Kent even included himself and his mistress, the actress Elizabeth Butler). In Courtiers Lucy Worsley, chief curator of the Historic Royal Palaces, provides the stories of sixteen courtiers. These include Peter the Wild Boy, an autistic feral child captured in the woods near Hanover, Germany, and his guardian, the physician and writer Dr. John Arbuthnot; two of George I's most trusted servants, Mustapha and Mohammed; the pretty Mrs. Elizabeth Tempest, milliner to Princess Caroline, and, hanging off the painted balcony railing, a mischievous page boy of George II's mistress Henrietta Howard.

It's a fascinating glimpse of the society that developed in and around the Georgian court. Since each courtier's life intersected with those of many others, Worsley is able to give a cross-section of court life, from the servant's quarters to the King's Gallery. Because she focusses on particular courtiers in turn, a certain amount of repetition is inevitable—but also helpful, as there's a large cast of characters. The book is thoroughly researched but Worsley's style is engaging and unacademic.

https://youtu.be/-9IwJus6ESQ

Nonfiction: Honorable Mention

Lucy Worsley, The Art of the English Murder (2014)

Cover of Lucy Worsley's The Art of the English Murder (Pegasus Crime, 2014). Image source: Simon and Schuster

I haven't yet found a subject that Lucy Worsley can't write a highly entertaining book about. The Art of the English Murder is a companion volume to her BBC series A Very British Murder. Bookended by two essays, Thomas De Quincey's "On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts" (1827) and George Orwell's "Decline of the British Murder" (1946), Worsley's survey covers the continuing public fascination with murders, murderers and detectives both factual and fictional, such as:

• the Ratcliffe Highway Murders, which inspired De Quincey's essay;
• the Elstree Murder, whose sites were visited by "murder tourists" including Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton;
• the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud's Waxworks, a hugely popular display of historical and contemporary murderers (Dr. Crippen remains on display to this day);
• the Bermondsley Horror, whose married perpetrators were hung at one of the last public executions in Britain;
• the development of crime, detective, and sensation fiction by writers such as Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Arthur Conan Doyle;
• the Golden Age of crime fiction created in the 1920s and 30s by women writers such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh;
• and the early films of Alfred Hitchcock such as The Lodger (1927), Blackmail (1929), and Murder! (1930).

Given its 150-year span, both real-life and fictional scope, episodic structure and intended audience, Worsley's book can't go into great depth on any particular topic. But it's a lively and very enjoyable survey of the place of British crime in the collective imagination, as I'm sure is true of the television series as well:

https://youtu.be/aT2vrK6bPDU

My Favorites of 2024:

• Movies and television
• Recorded music
• Live performances
• Books

Favorites of 2024: Live performances

We saw a lot of great live performances this year, so it was difficult to narrow my choice of favorites to just eight. In chronological order of performance:

Premier Ensemble of the San Francisco Girls Chorus with musical director Valerie Sainte-Agathe. Image source: San Francisco Girls Chorus

Antonio Vivaldi, Juditha Triumphans (Judith triumphant, 1716), libretto by Iacopo Cassetti.

Performers: Premier Ensemble of the San Francisco Girls Chorus, musical direction by Valerie Sainte-Agathe, stage direction by Céline Ricci, score arranged by Adam Cockerham.

Co-presenters and venue: San Francisco Girls Chorus and Ars Minerva; Z Space at Project Artaud, San Francisco; seen 9 March.

Antonio Vivaldi wrote many of his works for the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice. The Pietà was one of four orphanages that took in abandoned girls and provided musical training to those who showed talent; at various times Vivaldi was a teacher, music director and composer there.

So it's entirely fitting that the sacred oratorio Juditha Triumphans, written for the highly skilled women of the Pietà, was performed by the Premier Ensemble of the San Francisco Girls Chorus. The oratorio tells the Apocryphal story of the beautiful Bethulian widow Judith, who, when her city is beseiged by an Assyrian army commanded by Holofernes, goes to his camp and pretends to betray her people. But when she and her maid are left alone with Holofernes in his tent, she plies him with wine until he falls asleep, beheads him with his own sword, and escapes back to her city.

Judith beheading Holofernes, by Artemisia Gentileschi, ca. 1612. Image source: Wikimedia Commons

The score of the oratorio was arranged for a small instrumental ensemble and the arias were judiciously trimmed by theorbist Adam Cockerham. Stage director Céline Ricci assigned the role of Judith in turn to different members of the Premier Ensemble, suggesting that all women possess Judith's courage and strength. The singers were dressed in contemporary clothes, with each Judith being strapped by her compatriots into a breastplate symbolic of her warrior status. The transformation from one Judith to the next was often effected through a magic box onstage; one Judith would enter the box and after a few moments the next would emerge. Sharing the part of Judith was a meaningful way to distribute the taxing role among multiple young singers, who each fully embodied the heroine dramatically and vocally.

From Juditha Triumphans, the song of the Assyrians welcoming Juditha to their camp, "O quam Vaga," sung by members of the Premier Ensemble accompanied by Corey Jamason on harpsichord:

https://youtu.be/d1WP3N-dEzI?t=3218

After their excellent performance of Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas with Voices of Music at the 2018 Berkeley Festival and Exhibition, the San Francisco Girls Chorus did full justice to another great Baroque work written for young women with Juditha Triumphans. More, please! Next, might I suggest John Blow's Venus and Adonis (the other opera that we know was performed in the 1680s at Josias Priest's boarding school in Chelsea for "young gentlewomen"), or more music composed for the Ospedali? For more information on their upcoming projects please visit the SFGC website.

Clockwise from top left: Gregório Taniguchi, Mischa Bouvier, Julie Bosworth, Jesse Blumberg, Steven Brennfleck, and Agnes Vojtkó. Image source: American Bach Soloists

Johann Sebastian Bach, St. John Passion (1724), librettist unknown (possibly Bach himself).

Performers: Gregório Taniguchi (Evangelist), Mischa Bouvier (Jesus), Jesse Blumberg (Pilate), Daniel Yoder (Peter), Julie Bosworth (soprano), Agnes Vojtkó (mezzo-soprano), and other soloists, with American Bach Soloists conducted by Jeffrey Thomas.

Presenter and venue: American Bach Soloists; St. Mark's Lutheran Church, San Francisco; seen 10 March.

Bach's Johannes-Passion was written for his first Good Friday in Leipzig in 1724. Just a few weeks shy of its 300th anniversary, Jeffrey Thomas conducted a taut, compelling performance of the drama of Christ's condemnation and crucifixion. His soloists were uniformly excellent, but I must make a special mention of mezzo-soprano Agnes Vojtkó's moving rendition of "Es ist vollbracht!" The indefatigable tenor Gregório Taniguchi as the Evangelist and the bright-voiced soprano Julie Bosworth were both late substitutes in their roles and performed admirably. For information about the remaining concerts in ABS's 2024–25 season, please visit the ABS website.

Jory Vinikour and Rachel Barton Pine. Image source: Early Music in Columbus

Johann Sebastian Bach: Sonatas and Partitas (1717–23)

Performers: Rachel Barton Pine, Baroque violin, with Jory Vinikour, harpsichord.

Presenter and venue: San Francisco Early Music Society; St. Mark's Lutheran Church, San Francisco; seen 7 April.

This concert featured two of Bach's Sonatas for violin and harpsichord (No. 1 in B minor and No. 3 in E major), along with the great Partita for solo violin in D minor. All were written by Bach during his years in Cöthen, before he took the position of Thomaskantor in Leipzig. Rachel Barton Pine gave bold, extroverted interpretations of these works, particularly the monumental, 13-minute-long Chaconne of the Partita. It's the supreme test of any violinist, and she met its challenges with flawless technique. Although this was not as searching or inward an interpretation as some I've heard, Barton Pine's bravura performance was an equally valid reading and a stunning achievement. The 2024–25 San Francisco Early Music Society season continues; details can be found on the SFEMS website, where pay-what-you-can tickets are available.

Amanda Forsythe. Image source: Helen Sykes Artist Management

Awake, Sweet Love: English music for voice and viols (late 16th–early 17th century)

Performers: Amanda Forsythe, soprano, with Voice of the Viol, Elizabeth Reed, director.

Presenter and venue: San Francisco Early Music Society Berkeley Festival and Exhibition; Berkeley City Club; seen 11 June.

Amanda Forsythe is a pure-toned soprano who can manage astonishing flights of coloratura with apparent ease. This program called on a different talent: conveying deep emotion through deceptively simple means. Accompanied by the consort Voice of the Viol led by Elizabeth Reed, Forsythe performed love songs by English composers such as John Dowland, William Byrd, and John Wilbye, who bridged the time of Queen Elizabeth I and King James I. The Julia Morgan-designed Berkeley City Club ballroom, with its wood panelling and bright acoustic, was the perfect venue for this concert. If ultimately I think I prefer Forsythe in 17th- and 18th-century opera, it was still wonderful to hear her in this intimate repertory. This is the second of three entries in this list presented by the San Francisco Early Music Society, which seems to be going from strength to strength under the leadership of director Derek Tam (himself a well-regarded early music performer).

The Fortune Teller, Jean Frederic Bazille, 1869; The Death of Dido, Joseph Stallaert, c. 1872. Image source: The Handel Opera Project

Antonio Caldara: The Card Game (Il giuoco del Quadriglio, 1734), librettist unknown (possibly Pietro Metastasio).

Performers: Eliza O'Malley (Livia), Courtnee Rhone (Clarice), Daphne Touchais (Camilla), Katherine Gray (Ottavia); stage director Olivia Freidenreich.

Henry Purcell: Dido and Aeneas (1688?), libretto by Nahum Tate.

Performers: Sara Couden (Dido), Wayne D. Wong (Aeneas), Daphne Touchais (Belinda), Katherine Gray (2nd Lady), Don Hoffman (Sorcerer), Eliza O'Malley, Ellen St. Thomas and Reuben Zellman (Witches); stage director Ellen St. Thomas.

Presenter and venue: The Handel Opera Project; First Church of Christ Scientist, Berkeley; seen 15 June.

I'm of the school that Henry Purcell's 50-minute-long Dido and Aeneas is a full program all by itself, on stage or record, and needs no pairing (with the possible exception of John Blow's Venus and Adonis, the opera that Dido and Aeneas was clearly modelled on). So I approached this double bill with a bit of trepidation. That trepidation was only heightened when I noticed a banjo and electric bass player (Ryan Danley) listed among the instrumentalists, and that the Sorceress in Dido had become a Sorcerer (in the oldest surviving score the role is in the alto range).

And, in fact, apart from the vocal and instrumental forces required, there isn't really any connecting thread that I could discern between Caldara's witty comedy and Purcell's profound tragedy. The Card Game portrays a hand of quadrille played by four argumentative friends (the program helpfully included a reproduction of an 18th-century guide to the game). As one character sings, "card playing reveals your real character, whether you're winning or losing," and each player sings an aria illustrative of her personality—blithe, impatient, competitive, moralizing—until they all become frustrated and quit the game with a final chorus and invitation to dance.

It's a soufflé-light entertainment originally written for the Habsburg Archduchess Maria Theresa to perform in on her 17th birthday (she sang Clarice, while her sister Maria Anna sang Livia), and it was given a charming staging by Olivia Freidenreich. Perhaps a more closely related companion piece would have been Caldara's Le cinesi (The Chinese women, 1735), written for Maria Theresa to perform in on her 18th birthday, or Gluck's version of two decades later, which was Vittoria Tesi's final opera performance.

But we were there for Dido, and weren't disappointed. Sara Couden gave a magnificent performance in the title role, her deep, powerful alto conveying all the sorrow of the wronged queen. Daphne Touchais was an excellent Belinda, at first urging her queen to love the hero Aeneas (Wayne D. Wong) and too late realizing that her counsel has brought disaster.

There were subtle touches throughout Ellen St. Thomas's staging, which made good use of the unusual space in the beautiful Bernard Maybeck-designed church. And Danley's electric bass provided some eerie rumbling sound effects at the change of scene from Dido's court to the cave of the sinister Sorcerer (Don Hoffman) and his trio of witches (Eliza O'Malley, Ellen St. Thomas and Reuben Zellman). It was a production that made the most of its strengths, particularly Couden's memorable assumption of the title role. For current and future projects see The Handel Opera Project's website.

The servant Leporello (Donghoon Kang) clings to his master Don Giovanni (Hyungjin Son) in the Merola Opera Program's production of Don Giovanni. Photo credit: Kristen Loken; image source: SF Classical Voice

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Don Giovanni (1787)

Performers: Hyungjin Son (Don Giovanni), Donghoon Kang (Leporello), Lydia Grindatto (Donna Anna), Viviana Aurelia Goodwin (Donna Elvira), Moriah Berry (Zerlina), Justice Yates (Masetto), Benjamin R. Sokol (Commendatore), and Michael John Butler (Don Ottavio), with the San Francisco Opera Center Orchestra conducted by Stefano Sarzani; stage direction by Patricia Racette.

Presenter and venue: Merola Opera Program; Caroline H. Hume Concert Hall, San Francisco Conservatory of Music; seen 3 August.

As I wrote in my full review, "the inspiration for director Patricia Racette's production of Don Giovanni was the neorealist film movement in postwar Italy." But "her focus was less on the concept and more on helping the performers create fully fleshed-out characterizations. Interactions among the characters were also carefully thought through. As a result, this seemed more like a true ensemble work than merely a showcase for Hyungjin Son's excellently-sung Don Giovanni. . .Many a major opera company would love to be able to produce a Don Giovanni so well-performed and -directed." For future productions and showcases, see the Merola Opera Program website.

Ambroisine Bré. Image source: Olyrix.com

The Sound of Music in Versailles (late 17th–early 18th century)

Performers: Ambroisine Bré (mezzo-soprano), with Les Talens Lyriques directed by Christophe Rousset.

Presenter and venue: San Francisco Early Music Society; First Church UCC, Berkeley; seen 12 November.

What a privilege to see the renowned Christophe Rousset and musicians from his ensemble Les Talens Lyriques. They appeared twice on my Favorites of 2021: Recordings list, and could have appeared again this year with Lully's Acis et Galatée (Aparté AP269), in which Ambroisine Bré sang Galatea. She also sang Climene in Francesco Cavalli's L'Egisto (Château de Versailles Spectacles CVS 076), another candidate for my favorites list that was cut (for reasons of space, not quality).

The program was French music primarily from the time of Louis XIV by Lambert and Lully, with two rarely performed cantates by Montéclair that were first published in 1728, during the reign of Louis XV, but may have been written earlier. Lambert's music was simpler and each song tended to focus on a single feeling or state of mind, while the Lully and Montéclair selections were more like miniature operas, calling on Bré to express a wide range of emotions. Her voice is lovely, with an appealing richness in its lower range. As Christophe Rousset says in the preview video below, this is music of intimacy and refinement, and Bré and Les Talens Lyriques were its ideal exponents.

https://youtu.be/op0TH9lSd9c

For more information about the remaining concerts in the 2024–25 season, please see the SFEMS website.

Alexa Anderson as the title character in La Flora. Image source: Ars Minerva

Antonio Sartorio and Marc'Antonio Ziani: La Flora (1681), libretto by Novello Bonis.

Performers: Alexa Anderson (Flora), Jasmine Johnson (Pompeo), Wayne Wong (Silla), Aura Veruni (Emilia), Sara Couden (Servio), Nina Jones (Geminio), and others; stage director Céline Ricci.

Presenter and venue: Ars Minerva; ODC Theater, San Francisco; seen 17 November.

All opera involves suspension of disbelief, but the lieto fine or "happy ending" of Baroque opera is a convention that can stretch credulity past the breaking point. After three hours of misunderstandings, reversals, threats, betrayals, and anguish, in the final scene all conflicts are abruptly resolved and the proper couples are united at last.

But in the end is everything always made right, and are the right couples always united? Sometimes (as in Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea (The Coronation of Poppea, 1642), or Handel's Agrippina, 1709) that question is raised explicitly, but even when it seems we're supposed to take the happy ending at face value we can feel a distinct unease.

In La Flora, director Céline Ricci brilliantly heightened that unease. The Roman ruler Silla (Wayne Wong) orders his son-in-law Servio (Sara Couden) to divorce Silla's daughter Emilia (Aura Veruni) so that she can be married instead to Pompeo (Jasmine Johnson). The new marriage is planned for Sulla's political advantage; the feelings of Emilia and Servio, who love each other, as well as those of Pompeo and Flora (Alexa Anderson), who are also a couple, are not consulted.

Servio obeys Silla's orders to divorce the stunned Emilia, but then dies when he attempts to lead a rebellion and kill Pompeo. Emilia is left bereft and in a state of shock, which was depicted with chilling verisimilitude by Ricci and Veruni. Her status as a sexual pawn in her father's political game is made wrenchingly clear to her, and to us. No happy ending is ever going to be possible for her, and indeed in the final scene Ricci imagines the opera's characters taking matters into their own hands to elude the dictator's calculated arrangements.

Once again, as she writes in her director's note, Ricci's staging of a centuries-old opera was "more than an exercise in musical archaeology." In La Flora, "the human cost of political machinations is illuminated—a reality as relevant today as it was in ancient Rome or 17th century Venice." On a budget several orders of magnitude smaller than that of our civic opera company, she brought together all the elements necessary for another incisive Ars Minerva production: a restored performing score by theorbist Adam Cockerham, an excellent period-instrument ensemble led by Matthew Dirst, a vocally and dramatically compelling cast, Entropy's scene-setting projections, Marina Polakoff's costumes (especially a series of glittering gowns for Flora), Joe McClinton's colloquial supertitles, and her own keenly intelligent direction.

As ever, Ricci's work brought us much pleasure this year. It's fitting that my list of favorite performances of 2024 begins and ends with her. For more on her past and future projects, please see the Ars Minerva website.

My Favorites of 2024:

• Movies and television
• Recorded music
• Live performances
• Books