Bookstore Event & Feminism in Mythic Reversals

Bookstore Event

First up in this post, I am looking forward to my upcoming event at Village Books in Bellingham, WA on Saturday afternoon, June 20th. If you live anywhere in the area, please come. Village Books asks that you book a ticket in advance. This appearance will be especially fun because Karen Odden and I are joining forces. She writes Victorian mysteries and I write Greek myth retellings. You would think there’d be little in common, but you would be gravely mistaken! We are structuring our free-flowing conversation around a handful of photos, weaving between her book, An Artful Dodge, and mine, Achilles’s Wife. I won’t give away all the connections we find between our books, but this will be a high energy, creative, and thought-provoking conversation.

On to Feminism in Mythic Reversals

And for a thought-provoking conversation right here in this post, I’m sharing an article I wrote for the Historical Novel Society’s blog about “Finding Feminism in Mythic Reversals.” For those of you who’ve followed my writing career for a while, you know my latest novel, Achilles’s Wife, represents a return to the context of Greek myth, where I had also set my first novel, Hand of Fire. This short article delves into some of my motives for that return and why I think Greek myth retellings are important in the overall fiction landscape.

Finding Feminism in Mythic Reversals

Creating feminist novels from the reinterpretation of Greek myths has grown into a significant subgenre in recent years. A perusal of my local indie bookstore’s display of popular books revealed several. These novels take on issues such as shaming and villainizing women for the “sin” of being violated or refusing to be silent. Why this strong connection between feminism and Greek myth?

Two of my novels fit in this trend, and I wanted to explore what drew so many authors to base their women-focused novels, counterintuitively, in these patriarchal ancient stories. Consider the archetypes of Greek mythology that underpin our society’s definitions of what heroic versus monstrous behavior is, and who should have power and voice within society.

Turning Myths on Their Heads

So many of our foundational beliefs came from these definitions and norms, infused for centuries into our culture, so if we want to uproot those assumptions—genuinely change them—we must turn the myths on their heads. Altering these age-old models by reinterpreting myths shocks the cultural system. As a storytelling process, it goes to the core of who we are and what we unthinkingly accept. For a novelist, the goal is finding a medium that reaches into hearts and minds in an organically transformative way without preaching. Mythic retelling often works that way.

Two Brilliant Examples

Let me look at two brilliant examples of Greek myth retellings to explore the ways they invert archetypes.

Natalie Haynes’s Stone Blind, a retelling of the Perseus and Medusa myth published in 2022, is a good start. Perseus, the usual ostensible hero, is summarized by Athene late in the novel as “quite cowardly and stupid . . . He’s more the kind of person who doesn’t learn anything.” It’s true that the goddess is motivated to portray him in the worst possible light at the end since she wants to steal Medusa’s head from him for herself. Her point is that he isn’t worthy of it. But interestingly, in Haynes’s telling, Athene isn’t worthy of Medusa, either.

We’re told at the very start of the novel, “the hero isn’t the one who’s kind or brave or loyal. Sometimes . . . he is monstrous.” Haynes flips the myth. Medusa with her snake-covered head is a person we care about, a person who loves and sacrifices for others’ well-being. As Haynes said in a 2022 interview with The Bookseller, Stone Blind is “an attempt to retell the story of a woman who was viciously abused and assaulted and to see her neither as a monster, nor as a victim but as a person.”

 Why is she cursed and punished by Athene? Because Medusa had the gall to be raped by Poseidon inside Athene’s temple. The goddess shames the victim and thus participates in the crime against a woman as much as Poseidon. Haynes creates a deep attachment to Medusa in chapters showing her mortal childhood with her Gorgon sisters and thus gives power to this reversal of the usual definitions. We know who’s the true hero. We know Athene’s cruelty and Perseus’s violence and incompetence are the true monsters. Haynes’s novel jolts our assumptions about heroism and undermines society’s characterization of the “monstrous” woman.

Madeline Miller’s 2018 Circe is the most read of these feminist myth retellings. She also uses our expectations of myth to startle her readers into feminist sympathies and understandings. While in Circe the primary theme—to be human is more meaningful than to be immortal—is a Homeric, universal theme rather than a directly feminist one, Circe’s centrality to the tale, rather than Odysseus’s, and her rise to independence and power without the blessing of the male gods who think they control her life, place this novel at the heart of the feminist trend.

The gods treat Circe with the arrogant self-absorption and dismissal that is present in the worst of human male treatment of women. In Miller’s take, the gods have a divinely amplified version of this failing. For example, Helios, Circe’s sun god father, in his obsidian halls “believed that the world’s natural order was to please him.” He’s a study in bad fathering and of judgment led astray because of stupid assumptions about everything female. One of the key turns of the book’s development involves rape and revenge for rape. Circe takes the epic poets to fault as part of the larger portrayal of men’s attitude toward women. Circe recollects hearing, years after Odysseus has left, a sung version of her meeting with him, “the proud witch undone before the hero’s sword. . . Humbling women seems to be a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.”

Giving Voice to Silenced Women

Many other Greek myth retellings create similarly effective feminist versions that turn the myths upside down. Sometimes retellings rework tradition by giving voice to silenced women. This is true for Natalie Haynes’s A Thousand Ships, told by many women, Greek and Trojan, which she says is “the story of all of them.” Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls puts this idea straight into the title. My own two Trojan War novels, Hand of Fire and Achilles’s Wife, give marginalized women the main character role, Briseis and Deidamia, and in doing so, show them as compassionate leaders and, in Deidamia’s case, the mother of a dubious traditional hero, Neoptolemus.

In a 2025 article in Cherwell, Oxford’s student newspaper, Hannah Becker asked why we are so obsessed with Greek myth retellings. She says, “Myths offer structure in the chaos – not moral clarity, but continuity. Their archetypes persist precisely because they are so elastic . . .” I would suggest that our obsession today may arise because writers are purposely reversing the myths, not pushing their elasticity. It’s not continuity we crave but a break from old cultural assumptions, and so we reverse the mythic tales to reflect a new set of attitudes we want to shock into life in our collective belief system.

References:

Stone Blind, Natalie Haynes, 2022, Harper Collins

“Natalie Haynes on challenging patriarchal historical narratives and championing female voices,” Interview with Alice O’Keeffe, July 1, 2022, The Bookseller, https://www.thebookseller.com/author-interviews/natalie-haynes-on-challenging-patriarchal-historical-narratives-and-championing-female-voices

Circe, Madeline Miller, 2018, Little, Brown and Company

A Thousand Ships, Natalie Haynes, 2021, Harper Collins

The Silence of the Girls, Pat Barker, 2018, Doubleday

Hand of Fire, Judith Starkston, 2014, Bronze Age Books

Achilles’s Wife, Judith Starkston, March 2026, Bronze Age Books

“Why we’re obsesses with Greek Myth Retellings,” November 12, 2025, Cherwell, https://cherwell.org/2025/11/12/why-were-obsessed-with-greek-myth-retellings/

Further about Karen Odden

You may enjoy my earlier post about Karen Odden’s talk on Writing Secondary Characters, and her previous novels.