WENDY SMITH is a contributing editor of the Scholar and the author of Real Life Drama: The Group Theatre and America, 1931–1940.
Greek myths were among my favorite stories when I was little, thanks to Ingri and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire’s charmingly illustrated (and thoroughly sanitized) collection of retellings for children. When I was older, Edith Hamilton’s non‡ction and Mary Renault’s novels introduced me to the society that invented those myths. In my teens, I read The Iliad and The Odyssey in Robert Fitzgerald’s poetic English renderings and was swept away by their epic accounts of heroism and adventure. Several decades later, however, I began to have mixed feelings about these literary cornerstones. While I was reading the myths to a son not long past his toddler years, it occurred to me that the Greek gods were in essence all-powerful, immortal two-year-olds: willful, focused exclusively on their own desires, inclined to wreak havoc when thwarted and enraged. That realization amused me at first, until I thought about the fact that the havoc wrought by the gods included war, famine, and human sacrifice. The myths depict a violent, unpredictable, and fundamentally unjust world that the ancient Greeks apparently accepted as a given. Rereading The Iliad a few years ago, I was struck by it less as a masterpiece of poetry (which it is) and more as an emblem of a brutal military culture.
I am clearly not the only one to have had these thoughts in the past two decades. Since 2005, when Margaret Atwood’s gave Odysseus’s long-suffering wife a tart voice and a skeptical view of his fabled travels, some two dozen novels have retold various Greek myths from feminist perspectives. In 2023 alone, new books by genre veterans Natalie Haynes (), Jennifer Saint (), and Claire Heywood () were joined by debuts from Costanza Casati () and Lauren J. A. Bear ) along with reissues of Katharine Beutner’s and Jessie. This summer brings Saint’s fourth novel, and in December, Booker Prize–winner Pat Barker will come out with the ‡nal volume in her trilogy about the Trojan War. Madeline Miller, author of and is at work on a novel about Persephone.
