I recently discovered in the library one of my best-beloved books from my misbegotten youth, MARA, DAUGHTER OF THE NILE, by Eloise Jarvis McGraw. It's a book that has held up surprisingly well over the decades, and I recommend it to anyone who missed it -- the story has romance, intrigue, action, humor, terrific side characters in timid Innanni and gruff Nekonkh, a hella sexy hero in Sheftu, and an amazing heroine (especially for the Fifties!) in Mara herself -- sly, clever, amoral, funny, thoroughly delightful.
But what brought me up short and led me to post here was this description of Mara's first encounter with Hatshepshut, the female Pharoah:
(long quote after the cut)
( Read more... )Remind anyone else of the first appearance of a certain queen in THE THIEF?
Hatshepsut is a minor character, and a villainous one, but even as a young reader, I remember that I felt great sympathy for her difficult position as a woman wielding power in a sexist culture, and admiring her ruthlessness and dignity. Re-reading MARA, I was reminded more and more of an Irene-that-could-have-been, paranoid, cruel, both dependent upon and suspicious of her powerful male advisors,
relying on her beauty, her claims to divinity, and above all her coldness to the point of personal disaster.
I know that MWT loved many of the same historical novels I did -- the wonderful shout-out to Rosemary Sutcliff in the first book is proof of that. I wonder if she too subconsciously remembered McGraw's Hatshepsut, and decided to show what could have happened, had her gods chosen to be more kind?
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