Barbara Linn Probst’s debut novel, Queen of the Owls, is stunning: gorgeous prose highlighting a book about creativity, seeing and being seen. As a former photographer and artist, this book has everything needed to intrigue me: Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Steiglitz, painting, photography, art history, feminism, women’s bodies, and the price a woman pays to be creative, to be all she was meant to be, to be seen as herself—not merely in the male gaze or a reflection of a man.
Elizabeth is an Art History Ph.D. candidate stuck in the rut of a marriage that never should have been. Her dissertation is on O’Keeffe’s time in Hawaii. Her feelings are chiseled open by an unusual relationship with a photographer, Richard Ferris. Together, they explore the seen and unseen, the whole and the fragment. With Ferris, she feels safe enough to reveal her innermost desires as they reproduce the photographs in which O’Keeffe posed for Steiglitz. When Ferris exhibits those photographs—without her permission—Elizabeth’s position at the university, her personal and professional reputations, and her marriage are at risk. Despite the precariousness of her life at the moment, Elizabeth realizes that she is authentic, a fully-dimensional person, one with desires—and desirable. She stands at this rift in her life and must decide whether to leap across the void or to retreat.
This is an intimate, yet psychologically deep look at one woman’s attempts to balance love, life, children, and career—and above all, to liberate herself from the limits of her own expectations and to evolve.
A rare book in that I turned to the beginning and read again immediately.
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