Building on the ‘excellent review of women writers responding to Homer in Hall, The Return of Ulysses, 2008: 115–29’, the volume editors have gathered a set of articles on women who, over the past 100 years (the time frame of the book), have written about their responses to Homer, as well as their interpretations (sometimes also translations) of his works, from the aftermath of the First World War to the most recent examples, such as the popularly acclaimed novels by Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles (2012) and Circe (2018). The first part includes studies on the Iliad, followed by a comparable number of responses to the Odyssey. Along the way, the chapters discuss and illustrate the different focuses and styles of the first, second and third wave of feminism.
In the introduction the editors present the essays and briefly contextualise each of the authors and works covered. They conclude the informative essay by evoking the passage in the Iliad in which Hector sends Andromache to her rooms and her weaving, leaving war for men. The Odyssey repeats these words, in the mouth of Telemachus, addressed to Penelope, replacing ‘war’ with ‘word’. The women writers included in this book are, on the contrary, proof that both war and words are also a woman's business.
The editors and contributors are all feminist critics, who have in the past written on women writers. The book opens with essays on H.D. (by G. Liveley) and Elizabeth Cook's Achilles (by P. Stoker). Liveley's essay presents an overview of H.D.'s works, focusing on the often-playful ways in which the poet engages with Homer's poetry in almost all her writings and despite her belief in the impossibility of writing poetry after Homer. This essay focuses on the poem Helen in Egypt (1961). Cook's Achilles retells the story of the hero in a poetic novella, in which Cook goes beyond what Homer, or even Statius, recounts. Cook reads Achilles through the lens of John Keats. Stoker highlights with well-chosen examples how Cook incorporates into her text Keats's poetic universe, which in turn, reworks John Milton, George Chapman and William Shakespeare. Keats's physicality, the experience of the body, is evident in Cook's language, as Stoker shows.
C. Burke concentrates on the French-speaking writers Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff, who, in their reactions to the horrors of the Second World War, emphasised Homer's humanity. Although the two differ in their response to the Iliad (Weil centring on the concept of force, Bespaloff highlighting the character of Hector), they had in common a life and destiny that other notable women of their time experienced as well. Both were philosophers, thinkers and writers, and I would note that their lives also mirror those of Edith Stein or Virginia Woolf. All met their ends violently, either gassed by the Nazis (Stein) or by suicide (Bespaloff, Woolf and possibly, Weil). N.S. Rabinowitz, in turn, highlights how Christa Wolf's novel Cassandra reflects the lack of humanity that Wolf associated with masculinity and war and, in so doing, excludes the feminine experience. Rabinowitz argues that, in the novel, empathy both transcends feminism and engages with contemporary politics.
C. Hahnemann's reading of Alice Oswald's poem Memorial meticulously dissects Oswald's work, revealing the ways in which Oswald transformed the Iliad's narrative. Hahnemann raises the possibility of a feminist reading of Memorial, only to conclude that, despite Oswald's critique of the masculine love of war, she does so from a humanist, rather than a feminist, position. Kate Tempest's hip-hop epics, Brand New Ancients and Hold Your Own, are represented in E. Spiers's essay as a new type of epic, in which every man is a hero; the epics thus summon all of humanity to action, to work and to strive towards a better future and to tell their own heroic stories. By the use of Homer and other voices of the literary tradition (such as Blake), Tempest maintains the continuity of the epic tradition in this new medium of post-literary performance.
Almost all the women writers studied in this volume who engage with the Odyssey concentrate on the many representations of femininity in the poem and especially on Penelope's role as weaver and artist. Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad is discussed by J. Richards, who focuses on how Atwood presents Penelope as rejecting her husband's image of her and becomes the author of her own song, telling the story in a way that competes with the male versions that the Odyssey seems to privilege. G. Paul's essay again explores Alice Oswald's poem Memorial (a version of the Iliad) and Barbara Köhler's Niemands Frau (‘Nobody's Wife’). Paul sees a common denominator in these two works, which she calls ‘speculative archaeologies’. Paul's translations of some passages from the German original exhibit the intricacies of Köhler's poetic assemblage, which Paul compares to Penelope's web. Paul calls the reader's attention to the fact that Köhler, like Oswald, understood her works as a ‘translation’, which raises the question of what a translation of Homer is. Theodorakopoulos's contribution, also on Köhler, examines the last part of Niemands Frau and its relation to Books 19 and 20 of the Odyssey. Köhler, as Theodorakopoulos explains, considered lyric to be the feminine poetic voice, just as epic is masculine, and Theodorakopoulos analyses her transformation (neither translation nor adaptation) of the Odyssey in the light not only of Homer's poem, but also of Elliot's The Waste Land and quantum physics.
Two essays concentrate on the ‘other’ women, Calypso and Circe. I. Hurst's piece examines storytelling in the Odyssey and the ‘dramatic monologues’ (Hurst's term) of women, apart from Penelope. Calypso, Circe and Helen have stories to tell, even if the main narrator (apart from the ‘poet’) is, of course, Odysseus. Hurst highlights the importance of the dramatic monologue as a medium in the tradition of revisionist myth-making and tracks its history in poetry composed in English. These monologues allow different, and especially personal, points of view to be presented, and they challenge readers to engage with and interpret them. Hurst also acknowledges the contribution of ancient authors to this development, from Hellenistic poets to Ovid and beyond. S. Murnaghan and D. Roberts jointly study several poems involving Circe (Louise Glück's Medowlands, Margaret Atwood's Circe/Mud Poems), one of the most mysterious characters in Homer. Unlike Calypso, Circe does not express her feelings. The essay shows how paying attention to this ‘other’ female destabilises the priority usually given to Penelope.
V. Reuter's contribution is dedicated to the long poem Ithaca by Francisca Aguirre. Aguirre reads Ithaca through the lens of C.P. Cavafy's poem and sees the island as Penelope's trap, her prison. Both Aguirre and her Penelope consider madness as a possible way out, only to discard it: overcoming the splitting of their personas (for instance, their dreams and desires that clash with the crude patriarchal reality), both Aguirre and her Penelope finally find freedom only when they leave their Ithacas behind. Aguirre's work is a warning too against adopting overly rigid divisions among the waves of feminist theory, since she, with her critique of wider socio-political issues, is a clear harbinger of the so-called third-wave feminism.
The last chapters all deal with contemporary women writers whose works belong to new genres, by which they present their interpretations of and reactions to Homer. Thus, Adèle Geras, the subject of F. Richards's essay, is the author of a children's book titled Ithaka. Geras emphasises the activity of weaving and Penelope as a creator of stories on her loom. This Penelope often diverges from the one represented in the Odyssey, which she explicitly denounces as untrue. Geras is aware of the pedagogical aims of children's literature and, as Richards highlights, of the oversimplification and devaluation of the Odyssey as a poem composed for (and maybe by) women, in comparison with the Iliad and with stories that have been told to children strictly for their amusement. Geras, although acknowledging this androcentric perspective, offers a new model to counter it. Gwyneth Lewis's A Hospital Odyssey is the subject of R. MacDonald's article. Lewis's work is a reinterpretation of classical epic within a narrative of illness, as the poet recounts how she cared for her husband after he was diagnosed with stage-four cancer. MacDonald shows how Lewis transforms her experience into an epic and this traditionally masculine genre into a poem about the all-too-common experience of illness, hospitals and doctors, on the part of an average British couple, an ill husband and a caring wife. She also meditates on the language used to speak of cancer, which is redolent of traditional epic militarism: fights, battles, victories etc. While preserving the epic's fantastic elements by her use of metaphors, Lewis refashions the perception of cancer not so much as an external enemy as a part of our own body. The trajectory of the couple is experienced as a nostos, a return to their previous togetherness and happiness. In the same vein, Cox examines Hélène Cixous's Homère est morte, the story of her mother's declining years and death. The Odyssey's monsters are metamorphosed into the terrors of illness and approaching death, this final nostos, which is not a return home but rather the destination of a journey that all of us must travel alone. The title of her work not only makes Homer a woman, but also a dead figure, mixing the personal and the literary in an extraordinary way.
E. Wilson's reflections on her translation of the Odyssey close the volume. Wilson explains her ethical responsibility as a translator, how the text of the Odyssey is a live entity that changes with its readers and interpreters, and not a museum piece. Wilson also contrasts her version of three passages of the poem with those of other translators (in particular Robert Fagles and Richmond Lattimore), with a view to revealing the merits of her own. It is obvious that all translators bring their own prejudices and their own culture into their work, and it is ethically responsible for a translator to be as honest and forthright about them as possible. There is a danger, though, of pushing the translator's own agenda too far, in Wilson's case, a feminist one.
There is a great deal to learn from this book, and much to enjoy. It is one of the merits that the book is not limited to writers in the English language, but also includes women writers from France, Germany and Spain. Although all the essays bring out voices that are silenced, or at least, diminished, in Homer, almost none of the contributions mentions the important classical precedents of such an approach, such as Lucian in his Dialogues or Ovid in the Heroides (Hurst, and Murnaghan and Roberts are the exceptions).
