New Faces on the Block

Jenny Diski

  • Venus Envy by Elizabeth Haiken
    Johns Holpkins, 288 pp, £20.50, January 1998, ISBN 0 8018 5763 5
  • The Royal Women of Amarna: Images of Beauty From Ancient Egypt by Dorothea Arnold
    Metropolitan Museum of Art, 192 pp, $45.00, February 1997, ISBN 0 8109 6504 6

What happened to Rosa Travers, after she’d been skinned (carbolic acid and phenol), had her nose snipped, received paraffin injections in her breasts and was irradiated to remove undesirable body hair? That would have been the first part of her prize. When all was done, she had an opera audition. Rosa Travers was a sweatshop worker who in 1924 had the distinction of winning the New York Daily Mirror’s competition to find the ‘homeliest girl in New York’:

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