Amazon.com (ISBN 0814758126, Hardcover)

Eve: A Biography, by Pamela Norris, is a lively, erudite, and accessible story about "history's first bad girl, who carelessly threw away the chance of Paradise." Part I, "The Making of a Bad Reputation," describes Eve's significance in early Jewish and Christian communities. Ancient rabbis considered Eve's primary role to be the "mother of all living" and referred to her sin as an example of what can happen to women who stray from their childbearing duties. Later Christian readers began the tradition of invoking Eve as the exemplar of sexual temptation--"the Devil's gateway" and "the first deserter of the divine law." Citing many such passages of religious history, Norris argues that the story of Eve "was developed to manipulate and control women." Although Norris's theological thinking is not as subtle as it could be, Eve is no facile feminist screed. The second half of the book voices a particularly strong argument. In "Fantasies of Eve," Norris considers Eve's literary incarnations in the works of Milton, Hawthorne, and Ursula K. Le Guin, among others. Moving from Scripture to secular literature, she patiently and brilliantly traces the slow and limited evolution of Eve's story into a defense of "the need to challenge boundaries, to make the imaginative leap, however difficult, unpredictable and even dangerous, into a new phase of existence." --Michael Joseph Gross