А novel written by a woman, related by women, dedicated to a woman. If the term hadn’t been so polemic, we would have called it “feminist”. Mutafchieva manages to stay at an arm’s length from all the conflicts, intrigues, and political games of the era; here power is presented as an insatiable monster, ripping apart and corrupting everyone, unlucky enough to step near it or trod in its vicinity.
– Marie Vrinat-Nikolov
NOVEL, 420 PAGES, 1991
I, ANNA KOMNENE
Mutafchieva boldly revisits Anna Komnene’s reputation, yet in prose rather than an academic study. The novel tells the story of this remarkable woman’s life through the eyes of the women who shaped her: her wily and emotional mother Irene Doukaina and her sternly majestic grandmother Anna Dalassene. A polymath famed for her encyclopedic erudition, Anna Komnene was a philosopher, historian, and the author of the medieval literary masterpiece, The Alexiad. Through her sharp-tongued female narrators, Mutafchieva uses Anna’s story to deconstruct medieval tropes of masculinity and paint what literary critic Katya Kuzmova-Zografova calls “a panorama of the women’s wars,”… implicit struggles, full of whispers and subterfuge, not only different from but more dangerous than the men’s battles.