What if Eve and Pandora survived to this day and met to tell their stories? What if Eve wrote a journal for her billions of descendants?

Eve and Pandora are old friends who have known each other for millennia, although they see each other only occasionally over the ages. When they get together for afternoon tea, they have much to talk about—and much to wonder about.

Their stories have been told and retold for thousands of years, but how well do we really know them? Genesis gives us only a few words about Eve, while the ancient story of Pandora and Epimetheus has been transformed in countless retellings. What happens when we set aside what we think we know and return to the stories themselves?

And what about the pictures? For centuries, artists have imagined Eve and Pandora in paintings, sculpture, etchings, and illuminated manuscripts. But what if some of the images we think we know so well have little to do with what their stories actually say? What might we see differently if we looked at them again?

From the familiar to the unexpected, the images lead us across centuries and cultures: from Renaissance paintings and medieval manuscripts to Islamic miniatures from Iran and India, an Ethiopian fresco, a painting from Peru, and works by artists whose visions of these first women are far removed from one another. What can these images tell us about Eve and Pandora—and about the people who created them?

And then there is Eve's journal. What would the woman at the beginning of Genesis remember, after watching generations of her descendants come and go? What might she think of the story that has been told about her for thousands of years? And what might she have to say about the events that Genesis leaves untold?

Behind the imagined conversations and journal lies a careful return to the ancient texts. Genesis is read closely and literally, alongside the stories of Pandora and Epimetheus, while the interpretations of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions provide a wider landscape of ideas about these first women. Yet the questions remain open. What does the text actually say? What have custom, literature, art and religion added to them over the centuries? And what possibilities remain in the spaces between the words?

As Eve and Pandora compare their memories, their stories lead naturally to the Great Flood, which appears in both Genesis and Greek mythology. In each story humanity must begin again from their offspring. Their conversation raises a larger question: who, after all, should be called a mother of humanity?

Part imagined history, part exploration of ancient texts and the art they inspired, Afternoon Tea in the Garden of Eden moves between the familiar and the unexpected, inviting us to look again at two women whose stories have shaped generations of ideas about humanity, women, and the origins of evil.

Perhaps it is time to let Eve and Pandora tell us what they remember.