context: comics > Some works

The Rose of Versailles

This historical romance, by Riyoko Ikeda, runs to 1,700 pages, has sold over 12 million copies, and has been adapted into an animated series, a live action movie (shot in Versailles) and even an opera. It's another romance starring, alongside real characters such as Marie Antoinette, a woman posing as a man. It's a work of courtly manners and small signifiers of status and feeling and meaning, so it's perhaps unsurprising that the nation of Genji should find a sympathetic reverberation with the high court of the Sun King.

Ikeda quit comics in 1995, in her late 40s, to concentrate on music instead.

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