Promotional Information

A powerful and poetic work of history on the figure of Orpheus- his life and myth, and his representation and imagining from the sixth century BC to the present day.

About the Author

Ann Wroe is the Briefings and Obituaries editor of The Economist. She is the author of six previous works of non-fiction, including Pilate: The Biography of an Invented Man, which was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Award and the W.H. Smith Award. She lives in north London.

Reviews

This insightful and visionary study, treading a perfect line between imagination and scholarship, is as readable and necessary as a fine novel. Ted Hughes, another mythographer, would have loved it
*Independent*

Ann Wroe has an acute eye for pastoral detail...and takes a novelist's care in exploring character and evoking atmosphere... [Orpheus] will leave you dancing
*New Statesman*

This is a most remarkable book... most rewarding... [a book] that will surely enhance Ann Wroe's already considerable reputation
*Irish Times*

Orpheus: The Song of Life is a book of wonders, learned, playful and passionate...For all her studies, her wide reading, her historical dilligence, Wroe's method is instinctive, as she searches for inspirations and connections across the millennia
*Guardian*

Curious... there are moments of sublime writing
*Scotland on Sunday*

strange, original
*Sunday Times*

This one really is a song ... It evokes, but it also embodies, its subject
*Tablet*

a dense, vigorous portrait
*Intelligent Life*

Manages, in prose both rhapsodic and precise, to convey the allure of the legendary bard from ancient Greece to modern times. This myth has flowered into truth
*Independent, Books of the Year*

Wroe (senior editor, Economist; Being Shelley: The Poet's Search for Himself) combines a scholar's attention to evidence with a poet's flair for words in this startlingly original history that traces the obscure origins and tangled relationships of the Orpheus myth from ancient times through today. It's mildly frustrating when one can't identify the source of an allusion-the book has no notes-but the tradeoff is worth it because Wroe succeeds in making the reader feel what it might have been like to follow Orpheus, who preached a universe in which "everything, from the atoms to the stars, moved in circles of reciprocal desire, and Love made everything dance." The appeal of this "first singer of holy songs," who quieted birds and made streams and mountains follow in his footsteps, has persisted: modern thinkers as disparate as Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Cocteau, and Anouilh have written about him, and Rilke is virtually Wroe's guide throughout this book, as the poet composes his dazzling sonnets to Orpheus in a whirl of creativity that is very much Orphic in its intensity. VERDICT This is a brilliant book. The reader will come away with a new appreciation and understanding of the power and beauty of the Orpheus myth.-David Keymer, Modesto, CA (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

This insightful and visionary study, treading a perfect line between imagination and scholarship, is as readable and necessary as a fine novel. Ted Hughes, another mythographer, would have loved it * Independent *
Ann Wroe has an acute eye for pastoral detail...and takes a novelist's care in exploring character and evoking atmosphere... [Orpheus] will leave you dancing * New Statesman *
This is a most remarkable book... most rewarding... [a book] that will surely enhance Ann Wroe's already considerable reputation * Irish Times *
Orpheus: The Song of Life is a book of wonders, learned, playful and passionate...For all her studies, her wide reading, her historical dilligence, Wroe's method is instinctive, as she searches for inspirations and connections across the millennia -- John Banville * Guardian *
Curious... there are moments of sublime writing * Scotland on Sunday *