Eva Palmer Sikelianos

A Life in Ruins

By: Artemis Leontis

Narrated by: Suzanne Stroh

This audiobook, narrated by Suzanne Stroh, reveals the untold story of a visionary 20th-century American performer who devoted her life to the revival of ancient Greek culture.

This is the first biography to tell the fascinating story of Eva Palmer Sikelianos (1874-1952), an American actor, director, composer, and weaver best known for reviving the Delphic Festivals. Yet, as Artemis Leontis reveals, Palmer’s most spectacular performance was her daily revival of ancient Greek life. For almost half a century, dressed in handmade Greek tunics and sandals, she sought to make modern life freer and more beautiful through a creative engagement with the ancients. Along the way, she crossed paths with other seminal modern artists such as Natalie Clifford Barney, Renée Vivien, Isadora Duncan, Susan Glaspell, George Cram Cook, Richard Strauss, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Nikos Kazantzakis, George Seferis, Henry Miller, Paul Robeson, and Ted Shawn.

Brilliant and gorgeous, with floor-length auburn hair, Palmer was a wealthy New York debutante who studied Greek at Bryn Mawr College before turning her back on conventional society to live a lesbian life in Paris. She later followed Raymond Duncan (brother of Isadora) and his wife to Greece and married the Greek poet Angelos Sikelianos in 1907. With single-minded purpose, Palmer re-created ancient art forms, staging Greek tragedy with her own choreography, costumes, and even music. Having exhausted her inheritance, she returned to the United States in 1933, was blacklisted for criticizing American imperialism during the Cold War, and was barred from returning to Greece until just before her death.

Drawing on hundreds of newly discovered letters, this biography vividly re-creates the unforgettable story of a remarkable nonconformist whom one contemporary described as “the only ancient Greek I ever knew”.

©2019 Princeton University Press (P)2020 Princeton University Press

Critic reviews

"A well-researched and well-written look at the life of the woman who brought ancient Greek culture from an idea into practice in the modern era." (Eleni Sakellis, National Herald)

"This is a powerful reclamation of a life it has suited others to place in the shadows, and a well-deserved appreciation of Eva’s own legacy." (Liz Gloyn, Times Higher Education)

"Leontis has written an important book that ideally illustrates the extremely complex personality of Eva Palmer Sikelianos, the American heiress and wife of Greek poet Angelos Sikelianos, and as a result has readjusted the focus on several areas of the cultural landscape of Greece in the early decades of the 20th century, proving Palmer Sikelianos' intimate association to and pivotal influence over them. At the same time, Leontis' cultural biography of Palmer Sikelianos pointedly underlines the necessity of applying multidisciplinary approaches to the proper understanding of complex cultural concepts, such as the effort to comprehend and define Hellenism in the 20th century." (Sophia Papaioannou, Classical Journal)