Literature

Compilations | Contemporary literature | Early 20th Century | 19th Century fiction and non-fiction | Boccaccio, On Famous Women

Compilations

Queen of Sheba Poetry selections from various periods, compiled by Tracy Marks, for her project Makeda, Queen of Sheba including Handel and three references in Yeats.

Contemporary literature

Amazon. Wisdom's Daughter: A Novel of Solomon and Sheba by India Edghill (also in hardcover.) Booklist writes:

"Edghill transforms a didactic fable, the story of King Solomon and his brief interaction with the Queen of Sheba, into a powerful love story of a man and the queen who won his heart."

Book page from the author's website. See also her reader's guide.

Review by Harriet Klausner. Generally positive.

"The comparison between the equal rights Sheba with its matriarchal primogeniture vs. the patriarchal Israel is an interesting perspective (perhaps too modernized for that era) while the court intrigue of Solomon's wives provides a glimpse of the personal agendas and thus the times."

Amazon. Love, the Painter's Wife and the Queen of Sheba by Aliette Armel, translated (from French) by Alison Anderson. Lone Amazon found it a tad intellectual for her tastes, "This is an odd little book."

Amazon France. Le Voyage de Bilq�s by Aliette Armel, "Dans la petite cour d'un palais au coeur du désert, une reine de seize ans s'interroge sur le pouvoir et l'amour..."

Publisher's blurb. Also an excerpt.

Amazon. Moon Goddess : The Queen of Sheba by Janice L. Dennie. Historical romance spun from the Bible, Ethiopian texts and the author's imagination. Reviewers like it, but one comments "I for some reason question if the events really happen."

"Re-visioning the Queen of Sheba: THE PLAY" by Miri Hunter Haruach, from "Awakened Woman e-Magazine." Opens with an amusing press conference scene:

"Woman 1: Your Majesty is it true that you never slept with Solomon?
Woman 2: Your Majesty, did you or did you not have a son?
Woman 3: Can we see your feet? Are you really part animal?"

Early 20th Century

The Queen of Sheba: Her Life and Times by "Phinneas A. Crutch" (1922), from Daniel Martin Varisco's Yemen Update, excerpts with an introduction to this amusing parody-biography of the Queen of Sheba as a high-stepping society dame.

"At a very early age the little Queen-to-be gave evidence of two pronounced peculiarities. She was ambidextrous, and double-jointed throughout. In addition it had become apparent, as the light burden of her young years began to accumulate, that she was destined to be deliriously beautiful, in the fatal Scythian style every characteristic of which &emdash; alabaster skin, jade colored eyes, fiery red or "salamander" hair, tiny hands and feet &emdash; she possessed to a bewildering degree. Aside from that she was a romp, a hoyden, a madcap, a hotspur and a tomrig of the first water.

Novel: The Queen of Sheba by Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1907). This isn't a novel about the Queen of Sheba, and I haven't read it to see where the name comes from. See Wikipedia: Thomas Bailey Aldrich.

19th Century fiction and non-fiction

Wonders of Nature... by Josiah Priest (1826). Popular light reading is surprisingly scholarly. Priest's work is said to have been read by Joseph Smith before he "translated" the Book of Mormon. Excerpts provided by Dale R. Broadhurst's The Oliver Cowdery Memorial Home Page.

Chapter from the Historical and descriptive sketches of the women of the Bible, from Eve of the Old to the Marys of the New Testament, (1851), p. 149ff. The book is by P. C. Headley, but the Sheba sketch is by H. W. Parker. It presents the Queen of Sheba for Victorian American females.

"[It] will fulfill its mission if it breathe encouragement to the maternal heart and infuse the spirit of their high destiny to any extent, into the minds of the women of America—a land which in its moral, no less than its civil aspect, is the world's modern Palestine."

Charles Adams, Women of the Bible (1851), page 94ff. 1851 was a hot year for women-of-the-bible stuff.

"Some Sacred Female Portraits" from the Southern Literary Messenger (Nov. 1853), pp. 659-664. Unknown author[1] reviews H. Hastings Weld's The Women of the Scriptures. Page 664 has some very "sour" comments on the illustration, which segues into one of the SLM's frequent exhortations for Southern literature separate itself from and surpass the bounds of Northern Literature.

Boccaccio, On Famous Women

Comment: I have the new I Tatti edition with the Latin text and an English translation, but neither appears online yet. I'm leaving this up in hopes something goes up.

Spanish translation.

Wikipedia: On Famous Women.