Women Creating Classics: A Retrospective

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From Madeline Millers Song of Achilles (2012) to Natalie Haynes A Thousand Ships (2019), there has been a huge rise in womens literary receptions of classics in recent years. Women writers are looking back to the classical past more than ever before, and there is serious public interest in womens responses to the ancient world. But at the same time, this is nothing new: women have been receiving classics for hundreds of years, across many different time periods, and multiple cultures.

This first volume in a two-volume set explores the different ways that woman have retold and responded to classics, as well as how these responses might resist or unpack the tensions inherent in notions of gender, race, canonicity, class and cultural heritage. This is of particular significance when we consider that classical education and scholarship has 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 such as Sappho, Lucrezia Marinella and Virginia Woolf to Toni Morrison, Roz Kaveney and Zadie Smith, this volumes demonstrates centrality of women's creations in the world of classics.

Author Bio

Emily Hauser is a Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter, UK. Her research interests include ancient women writers, gender and authorship in the classical world, and the reception of classical women by contemporary female authors. She has published on women writers in ancient Greece and Rome, as well as the reception of the Odyssey in Margaret Atwoods The Penelopiad.

Helena Taylor is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Classics and French Studies at the University of Exeter, UK. She is the author of Ovid in French: Reception by Women from the Renaissance to the Present (2023), Women Writing Antiquity: Gender and Learning in Early Modern France (2023), and The Lives of Ovid in Seventeenth-Century French Culture (2017). She is the co-editor of Women and Querelles in Early Modern France (2021) and she has published a number of articles on early modern womens classical reception.