Talk:Natacha Rambova/GA1

GA Review
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Reviewer: A. Parrot (talk · contribs) 05:06, 16 December 2017 (UTC)

The article does a good job of summarizing the disparate aspects of Rambova's life. I'd say it's close to GA standard, and with a little work it could become an FA, though not in time to be TFA on Rambova's next birthday, as you hoped on the Ancient Egypt talk page; FAC is too backlogged. However, based on my spot-checking of many of the sources I can access, there are some problems with the sourcing that also affect how complete the article is. While a GA isn't required to be as comprehensive as an FA, I noticed a few places where a reader could feel that something significant is missing.

A couple of the citations I checked don't entirely support the text. The copyright listing for Mythological Papyri (citation 105) doesn't describe the subject matter of Rambova's chapter. (This one is an easy fix; just cite that sentence to the book itself.) David Wallace (citation 106) doesn't dismiss the alleged relationship with Nazimova, just the notion that Rambova was lesbian. This kind of slight misrepresentation of a source can happen in article writing—it happened to me in my first GA—but I advise rechecking the citations to make sure they say what you think they say.

A larger problem is the way the article approaches Rambova's contentious personal life. The article treats the subject neutrally but sometimes fails to explain where the contentious claims about her originated, which could leave a reader wondering. Rambova "purportedly belittled and cheated on" Valentino, but who purported that she did so? I looked at the source, Rambova and Pickford 2009, and that book treats it as fact and has a footnote for it. I couldn't follow the footnote because of the limitations of the Google Books preview, but if you're still able to access the book, I suggest you look at what it says. Similarly, the section on Rambova's sexuality focuses a bit too much on authors' opinions, and the reasons why and when people started to suspect she wasn't heterosexual feel a bit buried. A good approach would be to list the pieces of evidence first: her closeness with Nazimova, her claim that the marriage to Valentino wasn't consummated, the evidence that it actually was consummated, de Acosta's autobiography, and possibly suspicions of friends of Nazimova (which are mentioned in Abrams 2008). Then you could lay out the opinions of recent authors.

One other thing I'd like to see, if Rambova gave any details beyond what's already quoted in the article, is what she thought was so profound about the Book of Caverns. Unlike the other texts she mentions as the book's equal, Egyptian underworld books aren't very common sources of inspiration for modern esotericists. But obviously you couldn't say anything more if Rambova never specified her reasons, and even if she did, I don't consider it necessary for GA status.

I'm putting the article on hold, but I think these problems can be addressed without much difficulty. Thank you for improving this article. A. Parrot (talk) 08:50, 16 December 2017 (UTC)
 * Thank you for taking the time to review as well as for the input. I have done a bit of work paring down the section on the claims about Rambova's sexuality; I was hesitant to include them in the article given the delicacy of the subject and contention regarding it (there is already discussion of this on this talk page from years back), but it's a claim that is so widely-circulated that I felt it irresponsible to at least not mention it in the article. I've tried to restructure that section based on your feedback, so now it more or less begins with one of the earliest mentions of it (which goes back to at least 1975) and the works through what the grounds of the claim is, and then contains a final paragraph with recent commentary from scholars/biographers. I didn't realize how wonky it was before, and I've tried to relegate some of the scholarly discussion to footnotes—that way, they're there, but not cluttering the body of the article. I also excised the claim regarding Rambova "belittling" Valentino during their divorce; I unfortunately do not have access to a physical copy of that book and cannot trace the source of that. Pickford mentions that this is part of the "story" (i.e. common story or mythology) surrounding Valentino and Rambova's relationship, so whether or not it was reality is impossible to say, and since it is a rather small detail, I don't see it as being necessary to include. Believe it or not, when I first started working on the article, a great deal of it had been copied verbatim from Pickford's post-script in Rudolph Valentino: A Wife's Memories of an Icon, so that was a whole mess in and of itself to clean up (I wondered for a period whether or not Pickford herself may have written the early versions of the article. As far as Rambova's interest in the Book of Caverns goes, I have not been able to uncover any information as to what her specific reasoning was; that information may lie in one of the manuscripts she left after her death, but it's difficult to know. Her quote regarding is rather ambiguous, though it does seem to imply that there was something about it that she found significant, or that struck her. I know next-to-nothing about Egyptology, but I also find this curious. If I've missed something else or need to give additional attention to other parts of the article, just let me know. --Drown Soda (talk) 06:33, 17 December 2017 (UTC)


 * Thank you for your quick response. The one hangup that I see is the citation to Wallace that I mentioned in my initial response (now citation 105), which still doesn't support the claim it's attached to. A. Parrot (talk) 18:12, 17 December 2017 (UTC)
 * Oops, you're absolutely right—I somehow missed that in the first go-around. Thank you!--Drown Soda (talk) 20:12, 17 December 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks. I think it meets the criteria now. A. Parrot (talk) 20:20, 17 December 2017 (UTC)