In recent years, a feminist reckoning with the misogyny of the ancient-Greek world has taken root in the literary sphere. Fictionalized retellings of classical Greek myths such as Circe, by Madeline Miller, Atalanta, by Jennifer Saint, Clytemnestra, by Costanza Casati, and The Silence of the Girls, by Pat Barker, have repositioned the one-dimensional, victimized, and villainized women of the familiar epics as main characters with rich personalities and complex motivations.
Emily Hauser, herself the author of For the Most Beautiful, a 2016 novel told from the perspective of two female characters from the Iliad, has now published a nonfiction book, Penelope’s Bones: A New History of Homer’s World Through the Women Written Out of It. In it, she investigates the lives of the real women who lived during the Bronze Age, the period during which Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are set.
