From Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles (2011) to Pat Barker’s The Voyage Home (2024), there has been a huge rise in women’s rewritings of ancient myths and texts in recent years. Women writers are looking back to the classical past more than ever before, and there is serious public interest in women’s reworkings of the ancient world. But at the same time, this is nothing new: women have been responding to the worlds of Greece and Rome for hundreds of years, across many different time periods, and multiple cultures and languages.
This first volume in a two-volume set explores the different ways that women have retold and responded to Classics across the ages, as well as how these responses might resist or unpack the tensions inherent in notions of gender, race, canonicity, class and cultural heritage—in a context in which classical education and scholarship have been confined to the ivory tower, studied by men in pursuit of an understanding of the ‘great men’ of history. Looking at extraordinary women writers across thousands of years, from Sappho, Marguerite de Navarre, Lucrezia Marinella and Renée Vivien to Tayari Jones, Roz Kaveney, Zadie Smith and Anne Carson, from ancient Greece to the Venezuelan diaspora, this volume demonstrates the urgency and the centrality of women's creations in the world of Classics.
Edited by:
Dr Emily Hauser (University of Exeter UK),
Helena Taylor (University of Exeter,
UK)
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 232mm,
Width: 156mm,
Spine: 20mm
Weight: 460g
ISBN: 9781350444362
ISBN 10: 1350444367
Pages: 304
Publication Date: 07 August 2025
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
College/higher education
,
Undergraduate
,
Further / Higher Education
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming
List of Contributors Introduction (Emily Hauser and Helena Taylor, University of Exeter, UK) 1. Women Creating History (Ian Plant, Macquarie University, Australia) 2. Classical Credentials: Women’s Intellectual/Sexual Licence in Sixteenth-Century France (Emma Herdman, St. Andrews University, UK) 3. A Troubling Exemplar: Early Modern Responses to Lucretia (Rebecca Langlands, University of Exeter, UK; Emma Herdman, St. Andrews University, UK; Helena Taylor, University of Exeter, UK) 4. Lucrezia Marinella and Ancient Rhetoric: A Woman’s Approach to Eloquence, Persuasion, and Metaphor in the Late Italian Renaissance (Francesca D’Alessandro Behr, University of Houston, USA) 5. ‘All the Allurements of Beauty and Eloquence’: Aspasia of Miletus and the Intellectual Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Isobel Hurst, Goldsmiths University, UK) 6. A Night in Ancient Rome: Renée Vivien’s Scholarly and Literary Re-Creation of the Cult of Bona Dea (Jacqueline Fabre-Serris, Lille University, France) 7. Sofiia Parnok’s Sapphic Cycle Roses of Pieria: Translation and Commentary (Georgina Barker, UCL, UK) 8. ‘Rebels Against the Tyranny of Men’: Women Performing Greek Comedy in Early Twentieth Century Britain (Mara Gold, University of Oxford, UK) 9. Virginia Woolf’s New Lysistrata (Polly Stoker, University of Winchester, UK) 10. ‘Saved with Ablatives and Declensions in the Toilet stall’: Classical Learning and the Poetry of Maxine Winokur Kumin (1925-2014) (Judith Hallett, University of Maryland, USA) 11. On Fran Ross’ Oreo (1974) (Justine McConnell, King’s College London, UK) 12. Figuring and Refiguring Penelope (Sheila Murnaghan, University of Pennsylvania, USA; Isobel Hurst, Goldsmiths University, UK; Emily Hauser, University of Exeter, UK) 13. On Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977) (Olabisi Obamakin, University of Exeter, UK) 14. Reflecting on Barbara Köhler’s Elektra: Mirrorings (Lena Grimm, University of Michigan, USA) 15. Latin American Receptions of Antigone (Moira Fradinger, Yale University, USA) 16. Madeline Miller: The Kindness in Homer (Jennifer Lawrence, University of Cambridge, UK) 17. Voices of Recovery in Josephine Balmer’s The Paths of Survival (Sheila Murnaghan, University of Pennsylvania, USA) 18. On Roz Kaveney’s Catullus (Jennifer Ingleheart, Durham University, UK) 19. Ovidian Metamorphosis and Disability Aesthetics in Kinetic Light’s Descent (Amanda Kubic, University of Michigan, USA) 20. Passim Clouds: From Helen to Norma Jean Baker of Troy (Evgenia Nicolaci, University of Bristol, UK) 21. On Zadie Smith’s The Wife of Willesden (2021) (Tracey Walters, Stony Brook University, USA) 22. On Alice Diop/Marie Ndiaye’s Saint Omer (2022) (Fiona Cox, University of Exeter, UK) 23. On Stephanie McCarter’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (2022) (Helena Taylor, University of Exeter, UK and Jinyu Liu, DePauw University, USA) Notes Bibliography Index
Emily Hauser is Senior Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter, UK. She is author of Mythica: A New History of Homer’s World, Through the Women Written Out of It (2025), How Women Became Poets (2023) and For the Most Beautiful (2016). She is co-editor of Reading Poetry, Writing Genre (2018). Helena Taylor is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Exeter, UK. She is author of Women Writing Antiquity: Gender and Learning in Early Modern France (2024) and The Lives of Ovid in Seventeenth-Century French Culture (2017). She is co-editor of Ovid in French: Reception by Women from the Renaissance to the Present (2023) and Women and Querelles in Early Modern France (2021).
Reviews for Women Creating Classics: A Retrospective
From antiquity to the present and across multiple media in different European vernaculars, this wide-ranging volume brings to serious scholarly attention, often for the first time, a number of classically inspired works by both seasoned and lesser-known women writers. -- Fiona Macintosh, Emeritus Professor of Classical Reception, University of Oxford, UK Women Creating Classics: A Retrospective brings together a fabulous array of both long established and rising scholars analysing mostly feminist reinterpretations of older myths and classical literature. Particular highlights are the introduction in translation of Lena Yau's Spanish mythological retellings in poetry, by Katie Brown, and the interweaving of Helen of Troy and Marilyn Monroe's stories as analysed by Eugenia Nicolaci. -- Anise K. Strong, Associate Professor of History, Western Michigan University, USA
