2022/155: Pandora — Susan Stokes-Chapman

...he gave Pandora a jar – not a box, as many believe. That error is due to a mistranslation attributed to the Dutch philosopher Erasmus. In his Latin account of the story he changed the Greek pithos to pyxis which means, literally, “box”. But the point is there was a pithos, and Zeus ordered her never to open it.[loc. 4240]

London, 1798: Dora Blake, an orphan, lives with her wicked uncle Hezekiah and his 'housekeeper' Lottie, and spends much of her time in her draughty attic room, kept company by her pet magpie Hermes, producing extravagant jewellery designs. She is appalled by the ruination of her dead parents' antique business: they were professional achaeologists, but Hezekiah is more interested in selling forgeries and making dodgy deals. And he won't let her down into the cellar, where his latest acquisition -- a huge pithos, or jar, which is reputedly cursed -- is being kept.

Bookbinder and antiquarian scholar Edward Lawrence is intrigued by the trade in black-market finds and forgeries, and when he hears of the pithos, and finds that it is so old that it seems to predate history, he is convinced that it could be the making of his antiquarian career. His friend Cornelius Ashmole (no relation, apparently, to the founder of the Ashmolean Museum) vows to assist him, though his motives may not be entirely pure.

I found this slightly disappointing. There are hints of the supernatural, but they fade away; the plot is, I think deliberately, predictable (deprived but virtuous heroine, wicked uncle, mysterious legacy, love at first sight, happy endings for the deserving); there is a rather cliched gay character, and an entirely unnecessary death; many of the characters feel two-dimensional, and don't change much over the course of the novel; and there are a number of anachronisms and errors which, while not affecting the story, vexed me. ("I might get run over by a tandem": in 1798? "His pupils look almost black": do you mean his irises? "Their salvation and their purist hell"? An aristocratic lady saying, of a high price, "You know I'm good for it"?)

I'd have liked more of the mythological, and more examination of the 'curse': the setting was intriguing, but the story unevenly paced, and the inclusion of historical characters such as Sir William Hamilton and his lovely wife Emma was well-researched but seemed superfluous.