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Epic win! Why women are lining up to reboot the classics

Natalie Haynes, Pat Barker and Madeline Miller are the latest novelists to explore the Homeric epics from a female perspective – joining in a timely act of reinvention

At the centre of Natalie Haynes’s absorbing, fiercely feminist new novel A Thousand Ships, about the women caught up in the Trojan war, is Calliope, the muse of epic poetry. Here, the goddess invoked at the start of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey has something to say about the story that is being told under her guidance:

There are so many ways of telling a war: the entire conflict can be encapsulated in just one incident. One man’s anger at the behaviour of another, say ... But this is the women’s war, just as much as it is men’s, and the poet will look upon their pain – the pain of the women who have always been relegated to the edges of the story, victims of men, survivors of men, slaves of men.

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from Culture | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2PDkCxG
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