Women Creating Classics

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).

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.

• List of FiguresList of ContributorsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction (Emily Hauser and Helena Taylor, University of Exeter, UK)Ancient and Early Modern1. Women Creating History (Ian Plant, Macquarie University, Australia)2. Classical Credentials: Women’s Intellectual and Sexual Licence in Sixteenth-Century France (Emma Herdman, St. Andrews University, UK)3. 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)Modern4. ‘All the Allurements of Beauty and Eloquence’: Aspasia of Miletus and the Intellectual Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Isobel Hurst, Goldsmiths University, UK) 5. 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)6. Sofiia Parnok’s Sapphic Cycle Roses of Pieria: Translation and Commentary (Georgina Barker, University College London, UK)7. ‘Rebels Against the Tyranny of Men’: Women Performing Greek Comedy in Early Twentieth-Century Britain (Mara Gold, University of Oxford, UK)8. ‘Saved with Ablatives and Declensions in the Toilet stall’: Classical Learning and the Poetry of Maxine Kumin (1925-2014) (Judith Hallett, University of Maryland, USA)9. ‘To read, to see, to spin, and to turn’: Reintroducing Barbara Köhler’s Elektras (Lena Grimm, University of Michigan, USA)Contemporary10. How to Be the Best: Madeline Miller's Patroclus (Jessica Lawrence, University of Cambridge, UK)11. Voices of Recovery in Josephine Balmer’s The Paths of Survival (Sheila Murnaghan, University of Pennsylvania, USA)12. Wrongful Conviction: Odyssean Possibilities in Tayari Jones’ An American Marriage (Justine McConnell, King’s College London, UK)13. Animating Disability Arts and Ovidian Metamorphosis in Kinetic Light’s DESCENT (Amanda Kubic, The University of Michigan, USA)14. Passim Clouds: Helen, Marilyn and Norma Jean Baker of Troy (Eugenia Nicolaci, University of Bristol, UK)15. Eating the Classics: Culinary rewritings of classical myths in poems by Lena Yau (Katie Brown, University of Exeter, UK)16. The Ovidian influence on Zadie Smith (Tracey Walters, Stony Brook University, USA)17. A Contemporary Medea: Alice Diop's Saint Omer (2022) (Fiona Cox, University of Exeter, UK)NotesBibliography Index