Anne Sebba Confronts a Ghost from History at Ealing Book Festival 2025
Prize-winning biographer Anne Sebba provided one of the most unforgettable moments of this year’s Ealing Book Festival when she came face to face with sculptor Nicole Farhi’s haunting portrayal of Ethel Rosenberg - the subject of Sebba’s acclaimed biography Ethel Rosenberg: A Cold War Tragedy. The encounter took place at Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery, where Farhi’s exhibition J’Accuse…! was unveiled as part of the four-day literary celebration.
Sebba, who was speaking at the festival about her latest work The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz, had not expected to be reunited so viscerally with the subject of her earlier book. But there, on the top floor of the Georgian gallery, stood Farhi’s sculpture of Ethel Rosenberg - an ashen, ghost-like face framed by thick black waves of hair. Unlike the other 24 colourful sculptures in the exhibition, Rosenberg’s image is left starkly monochrome, a visual echo of the chilling facts Sebba unearthed through years of research.
“I feel very proud that my book could be a catalyst for all of this,” Sebba reflected. Her biography, based on interviews and previously unpublished letters from Rosenberg’s final years in prison - two of them spent in solitary confinement - recasts the American mother of two not as a traitor, but as a symbol of injustice, wrongly executed in 1953 at the height of Cold War paranoia.
The book had a profound effect on Farhi. “I was reading Anne’s book and was so shocked by what had happened to this woman, innocent of the crimes she was accused of,” Farhi said. “I had to sculpt her face to free myself from my emotions.”
The sculpture’s pallor is not artistic license. Sebba’s research revealed that after Ethel’s execution by electric chair, her coffin remained open, and her face - completely white - was seen by those paying their respects. Reports even described smoke rising from her head during a failed first attempt at execution, requiring the switch to be thrown a second time.
This grotesque truth inspired Farhi’s striking interpretation, making Ethel Rosenberg not just a subject of history, but a contemporary icon of injustice - a ghost still demanding to be seen and understood.
Sebba, visibly moved, noted that seeing Rosenberg’s sculpture alongside the other faces in J’Accuse…! drove home the global scale of wrongful convictions. “Seeing them all together, one realises there are so many cases that are dubious or obvious miscarriages of justice,” she said.
While the Ealing Book Festival 2025 delivered a vibrant and diverse literary programme - featuring over 1,900 participants and appearances from writers like Hanif Kureishi, Elif Shafak, and Roger McGough - it was Sebba’s moment with Farhi’s sculpture that offered one of the most emotionally resonant narratives of the weekend. It was a reminder that literature, research, and art together have the power not only to educate, but to reckon with history.
Sebba’s book on Ethel Rosenberg is now available in paperback, and Farhi’s J’Accuse…! exhibition continues at Pitzhanger Manor. For those who witnessed this intersection of biography and sculpture, it was a deeply human moment - proof that storytelling can still shake us to our core.