Drawing on the classical tradition of Graeco-Roman biography, Victorian Cleopatras occupied a space between feminine and masculine, civilised and savage, Greek and Egyptian. For fin-de-siecle writers and artists, Cleopatra’s ambivalent position reflected the dissolution of established Victorian values. By analysing works of art, fashion, fiction and nineteenth-century adaptions of Shakespeare’s ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ (1607), this project will demonstrate how a radically reimagined cleopatra became an emblem of social and cultural transformation in late-Victorian Britain and the Empire.