Prose’s Cleopatra is less straight biography than an appraisal of the queen’s historical reception. The core of her thesis is sound: Cleopatra’s reputation has suffered from tired misogynist readings that say more about their authors than their subject. Alas, Ms. Prose trades the myopic conjecture of the past for the one-note fixations of the present.

The first few chapters are spent fixing the historical record, and they are, to be honest, a bit of a slog. A gorgeous novelist and prolific biographer...Prose is here, of necessity, mostly reassembling the research of others. But it’s a short book, and we quickly get to where Prose really sparkles: her critiques of the cultural depictions of Cleopatra. Prose vividly reveals just how much more marginalized, sexualized and scandalous these representations became, no matter the artistic medium..

The book functions more as a feminist critique of the legend than a historical view of the life.

Bland, bloodless and almost criminally undramatic, Prose’s book adds nothing new. In many respects, in fact, it’s less interesting and certainly less detailed than Cleopatra’s Wikipedia entries. In a desperate attempt to find a trendy angle, Prose throws in a lot of stuff about the 'racism, imperialism and misogyny' of the Romans, but this tells us nothing.

With her signature wit, incisiveness, and command, Prose (The Vixen, 2021) traces the origin of this reductive depiction to the sexism and racism intrinsic to the dazzling array of sources she so keenly critiques.

Stimulating feminist history.

A fresh look.