This biography commemorates a woman whose talents, earnings, ambitions and success as an artist were cruelly destroyed. An ambitious and avaricious man suppressed his major artistic rival through marriage as an institution of obedience and surrender bespeaking an implacable gendered heirarchy. Almas died in childbirth; but, comments Fawwaz, ‘it was said that the distress she knew was the true cause of her death’ (78). If Almas ‘plundered Egypt's riches’ with her sweet yet mournful voice, ‘Abduh al-Hamuli plundered not only her riches but her very selfhood, and her life.

Initially, Almas's is a narrative of ‘emergence’ and ‘ascent’, an upward trajectory from childhood in poverty to a celebrated and lucrative career. But her very success, and the marriage that resulted from it, reverses the trajectory. In Fawwaz's narrative, Almas plummets into imposed silence, economic deprivation and powerlessness (as her husband takes and loses her savings), and death. Ascent occurs through her talents and work; descent and tragedy follow – and are implied to be the outcome of – al-Hamuli's exertion of authority over her abetted by a patriarchal regime of husbandly control and masculine freedom of action that in her case induce trauma.