[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
Rewritings of Greco-Roman myth from a woman’s perspective are not a new thing in and of itself: a case in point that is often invoked in this context is Ovid’s collection of Heroides. Nor indeed are mythological rewritings by women authors a new thing either, a point well made in the recent volume by Helena Taylor and Emily Hauser (Women creating classics, Bloomsbury 2025), which starts with a consideration of Sappho, Corinna and other Greek women poets, then considers premodern and modern women engaging with the classics, but also includes the popular contemporary example of Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles (2012).[1] Yet, even if Taylor and Hauser stress the continuity of this practice of women rewriting ancient materials and show that many of the themes we see in the current rewritings (giving voices to previously silenced, marginalized or vilified women, opening up and questioning the canon) were already there in many previous rewritings, it needs to be said that what we have been witnessing for the last decade or so has been unprecedented in scale, popular reach, and impact. We can see this, for example, in the bestsellers of Madeline Miller, Natalie Haynes, Pat Barker, and Jennifer Saint, as well as dozens of new releases in this field hitting the bookstores every year. It is therefore timely and fitting that scholarship is starting to focus on this ‘rewriting turn,’ as Moreno Soldevila and Nisa Cáceres dub the phenomenon in their small but incisive edited collection of analyses of a number of current examples.
In Chapter 1, “Women, the Classics and the Rewriting Turn in the Twenty-First Century,” the editors make the important contention that what we are witnessing should be considered a ‘turn’, that is, a transformative moment in the history of classical reception, and not a commercial trend or a fad. More specifically, that this turn has rewriting at its core. The new popular novels are not looking merely to tell the story anew for a new audience unacquainted with certain ancient conventions like some retellings for children. They rather aim to reclaim and re-interpret the classical past from a new ideological angle, specifically, as the editors claim, in order to ‘actively challenge contemporary far-right appropriations of classical discourse, which often invoke nostalgia for a patriarchal past to reinforce exclusionary and regressive gender roles.’ (9) The authors state that this ideological stake makes the current rewriting turn similar to rewritings of Greek myth by women from the 1970s onwards, but they also point out differences. For instance, they invoke Hauserand Taylor (2025, 13) to support the view that the current generation of women authors ‘challenges the very foundation of the canon’, (10) and observe that they are no longer necessarily looking for a ‘literature of their own’ (Showalter 1977) or critiquing the fact that women can only ever describe themselves in ‘in code form’ (Ostriker 1982, 69).[2] Instead, these new authors are said to be aware of the precariousness of the rights and freedoms of contemporary women, which forms the source of a new urgency.
Chapter 1 lists, somewhat breathlessly, the main differences with what came before in terms of main thematic focus (female agency), intersectionality, experiments with narrative voice (crossing of genre boundaries especially with speculative fiction and fantasy), engagement with digital and popular culture, commercial succes, globalisation and collectivity. All these topics receive one or two paragraphs with often very briefly invoked recent titles to illustrate the point. A two-page overview illustrates how recent Classical Reception scholarship applies the approaches exemplified in the book (they specifically enumerate ecocriticism, trauma theory, and affect theory, 18) to this new rewriting turn. A presentation of the further chapters ends the introduction.
In chapter 2 Sánchez Gayoso convincingly applies the lens of what she calls ‘eco-refiguration’ to the 2017 novel The Mother’s Blade (Victoria Grossack and Alice Underwood). In that novel, Clytemnestra’s killing of Agamemnon is presented not as a personal vendetta but rather as a gesture of reparative justice, sanctioned by the Great Goddess as punishment for the king’s extraction of natural sources for his wars. Agamemnon’s action is marked for punishment in terms of both destruction of nature and the sacrifical murder of his own child, fuelled by his lust for power in the patriarchal society of the Late Bronze Age. This is a chapter where approach and a main theme of the new rewriting mutually enhance the interest for the reader and genuinely enlighten the novel’s themes.
Andromache’s marginalization forms the topic of chapter 3, by Dominguez-González, who contends that new rewritings show an Andromache who is no longer merely a paragon of female aretē exemplified by obedience and caregiving. Instead, in Pat Barker’s 2018 and 2021 novels (The Silence of the Girls and The Women of Troy) as well as Natalie Haynes’ 2019 A Thousand Ships, an Andromache is shown who independently negotiates her strong emotions and traumas after witnessing the death of her husband and child, becoming enslaved, and bearing the child of her husband’s murderer. Instead of focusing on resignation and obedience as the ancient texts did, such that Andromache was a sort of poster child of female submissiveness to patriarchal power, these rewritings show an Andromache who sees herself in her own terms and actively tries to come to terms with the ‘inner conflict between memory and survival’ (60).
In one of the strongest papers in the collection, chapter 4, by Burguillos Capel, Rosie Hewlett’s young adult novel Medusa (2021) receives an insightful and convincing reading in terms of the stakes of ‘sexual violence, narrative agency and a symbolic resistance’ (63) in the depiction of the protagonist. The chapter rightly highlights the importance of the symbolism of ‘blamed victim’ and ‘survivor of sexual violence’ that has come to define the figure of Medusa in fourth-wave feminism, especially after the #MeToo movement. In a useful and clearsighted overview of Medusa symbolism before that fourth wave, Burguillos Capel points out that whereas previous feminists (notably Hélène Cixous)[3] invoked Medusa as a symbol of the monstrous female other, desiring to upend the patriarchy with her chaotic presence and disruptive laughter, after 2017 versions of Medusa focus on the rape story told by Ovid in his Metamorphoses. The chapter argues that Hewlett does this with a twist: Medusa tells her own story but with hindsight, from the timeless present of the Underworld, ‘a complex survivor whose voice and subjectivity drive the narrative’ (65). Especially interesting is Medusa’s final encounter with a gentle and melancholy Perseus, ‘an embodiment of deconstructed masculinity, shaped by inherited trauma and empathy rather than heroic conquest’ (69), an encounter in which she herself chooses the moment of her own death.
Penelope, as she is portrayed by Margaret Atwood (Penelopiad, 2005), Madeline Miller (Circe, 2017) and Natalie Haynes (A Thousand Ships, 2019) forms the focus of the fifth chapter, by Cuevas Caballero and Velasco-Montiel. Analysis centers on comparison between those recent portrayals of Homer’s heroine, but it is not explained, however, why these particular novels and not others have been selected: why is Claire North’s trilogy on Penelope not considered, for instance?[4] The main lens through which these Penelopes are read is that of relationality (Can and does Penelope relate to other women?), while the question of ‘autodiegesis’ (How does she tell her own story?) is also brought to bear on the novels. This makes for a somewhat fragmented piece, as Penelope is not a focalizing character in Miller’s Circe (no autodiegesis), whereas relationality is not really a topic in Haynes’ A Thousand Ships, where an Ovidian Penelope writes letters to Odysseus. However, the observations about Atwood’s shrewd and cynical Penelope and Haynes’ sarcastic and disillusioned one are worthwhile.
The sixth chapter, by Cisneros Perales provides an overview of the trends in Spanish language scholarship occasioned by the rewriting turn in English and Spanish fiction, and tabulates relevant rewritings by women (listing original English title, translated or original Spanish title, original English author and Spanish translator or Spanish author, as appropriate, Spanish publisher, and dates of publication). For anyone interested in a meta-analysis of the trend focused on the Spanish speaking world, this is undoubtedly useful, collecting as it does a wealth of material.
The volume ends with an interview with Emily Hauser, classical (reception) scholar as well as author of some rewritings herself (the Golden Apple Trilogy, 2016-2018) conducted by Domínguez-González. Hauser makes a number of insightful remarks, positing for instance that there is no contradiction between the fact that classics as a discipline is precarious, whereas these novels are hugely popular; she in fact thinks that the restricted accessibility that characterized classics historically is at the root of both. ‘The novels… are saying: “Why…? Why did that happen? How did that come to be seen normal? …I think that is what is really opening up and allowing so many more voices to engage.’ The interview ends with the interesting question why there have not been any films or TV shows adapting the new novels so far, and the answer from Hauser that this is a matter of time, since HBO has taken on Miller’s Circe. It is tantalizing to imagine what the effect of this new medium will be on the current wave, on our visualization of antiquity, and on whether this will spark a further new ‘turn’ in popular culture, and how it will compare and contrast with the anticipated Odyssey blockbuster by Christopher Nolan.
To conclude, some brief remarks on the form of this ‘intervention’, as the editors call the volume: this interesting and accessible collection is presented and available as a book. But in editorial terms, it rather takes the form of an introductory overview, five separate articles and a transcription of an interview, all with separate bibliographies, and little cross-referencing. Since the collection is made available online in an open access format, that is an understandable editorial choice which works well for the separate analyses. The downside, however, is that chapters 1, 4, 5 all start or end with the same kind of considerations about how second-wave feminism in the 1970s and 1980s also witnessed a marked flare-up of the theory and practice of rewriting the classics by women with stake similar to those we witness in the current fourth wave. Reading the chapters in a series, this becomes a bit repetitive. As each separate contribution also has a separate bibliography, this makes for even more repetition: Hélène Cixous, Alicia Ostriker and Adrienne Rich are invoked many times over.
Nevertheless, the separate analyses are mostly well written and clearly presented, with up to date and extensive bibliographies and a representative and apposite range of contemporary theoretical approaches (ecofeminism, trauma studies, affect studies) which are brought to the specific case studies. Most pieces convince, even if some questions remain unanswered, such as why did the rewriting turn in question start so suddenly and so successfully just when it did? And why, in the novels themselves and their paratexts, are there no references to or acknowledgements of the feminist thinkers who are invoked as a matter of course in the scholarly analyses? But that only means there is room for more scholarship on this new turn.
The open access format, rich bibliography, and the accessible writing style make this a very useful resource e.g. for teaching. The choice of some slightly less known case studies (Crossacker and Underwood The Mother’s Blade, Hewlett’s Medusa) also makes the book attractive to those already more acquainted with the topic.
Authors and titles
- Women, the Classics and the Rewriting Turn in the Twenty-First Century (Daniel Nisa Cáceres and Rosario Moreno Soldevila)
- Eco-Refiguration, Vengeance and Feminine Sovereignty: Victoria Grossack and Alice Underwood’s Clytemnestra: The Mother’s Blade (Helena Sánchez Gayoso)
- Female Survival in the Trojan Aftermath: Andromache in the Fiction of Pat Barker and Natalie Haynes (Gema Domínguez-González)
- The Monster’s Gaze Disrupting the Male Gaze: Trauma, Gender and Feminist Mythmaking in Rosie Hewlett’s Medusa (María Burguillos Capel)
- Autodiegesis and Relationality: Tracing Penelope in Margaret Atwood, Madeline Miller and Natalie Haynes (Marta C. Cuevas Caballero and Carmen Velasco-Montiel)
- Women-Authored Retellings of the Classical Tradition: A Critical Survey of Scholarship and the Literary Polysystem in Spain (Miguel Cisneros Perales)
- Breaking Boundaries, Broadening Horizons: An Interview with Emily Hauser on the Reception of Classics (Gema Domínguez-González)
Notes
[1] For earlier studies on women authors and the classics, see also the numerous works of Fiona Cox and Elena Theodorakopoulos, e.g. (2019) Homer’s Daughters: Women’s Responses to Homer in the Twentieth Century and Beyond, Oxford University Press.
[2] E. Hauser, Taylor H. (eds.) (2025) Women Re-Creating classics. Contemporary Voices, Bloomsbury Academic. E. Showalter (1977) A Literature of their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing, Princeton University Press; A. Ostriker (1982) “The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking” Signs 8 (1):68-90.
[3] H. Cixous (1976) “The Laugh of the Medusa“ Translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs 1 (4): 875-93.
[4] Claire North’s Penelope Trilogy, known as ‘The Songs of Penelope’ (2022-2024).