AustLit

'In the preface to her historical account of the life and death of Jeanne d’Arc, Larissa Juliet Taylor observes that the sainted virgin warrior ‘has, in the nearly six centuries since her death, become everything to everyone – a Catholic, a proto-Protestant, a right or left wing partisan, anti-Semitic, nationalist, anti-colonialist, and even the face on cheese, chocolates, baked beans, and cosmetics’. From the minds of Shakespeare to André Malraux, Mark Twain to Luc Bresson, tens of thousands of literary, scholarly, dramatic, political, and visual representations of the maid have emerged, each one contributing to the re-imagining of this canonical figure though retellings, re-enactments and revisions. In the opening pages of his novel, The Last Days of Jeanne d’Arc, Ali Alizadeh challenges them all: ‘And how little… anyone… knows about the truth of Jeanne’s life.’ (Introduction)