Ziska

Cairo, the season: a beautiful woman nobody knows appears at the hotels, a French painter is destroyed by her, and it emerges that she herself is an Egyptian, dead for thousands of years, come back for the man who killed her. Corelli outsold Wells, Kipling and Conan Doyle combined and was Queen Victoria's favourite; this 1897 novel is her revenge story, and the tourists in it are drawn with real contempt. Fifty-five plates, from Goya to Redon, gather the haunted, mocking faces and strange still lifes that shadow this tale of a woman returning from the dead.