SOURCE: “An Allegory from Atlantis,” in New Left Review, No. 231, September–October, 1998, pp. 132–45.

In the following review of Medea, Watkins provides an overview of Wolf's literary career, thematic preoccupations, and the complex political context of her work.

She comes from a small, poor country in the East where the trees are hung with goatskin bags full of human bones, swinging in the breeze, to a western state so powerful, arrogant and rich that even the dead lie buried with food, jewellery and horses in their gorgeously furnished tombs; from a childhood full of secrets—‘but everything in Colchis was full of dark secrets’—to the glittering city-state of Corinth, whose people affect to have no secrets at all: though, ‘how much they hold it against you if you express doubts about their happiness.’¹

Thus Medea, in the first work of fiction since the reunification of Germany by the...