Which Feminist Greek Myth Retelling Should I Read?

No, really, please tell me

help me

Madeline Miller’s Circe came out in early 2018. In the years since, the category “feminist retellings of Greek myth with the main character’s name as the title” has really exploded. The six examples above — Atalanta, Clytemnestra, Medusa, Medea, Alcestis, and Phaedra — only represent a subset of the examples I could find with 2023 or 2024 pub dates! Broaden the search to include a few more years and you can add Ariadne, Elektra, Hera, Pandora, and more. Include books with less obvious titles, like Natalie Haynes’ terrific Stone Blind, and the list goes from intimidating to outright terrifying. Include a few slightly older (but still relatively recent!) books like Silence of the Girls and For the Most Beautiful and I’m pretty sure your TBR will just… give up.

I apologize if, based on the title, you thought I was going to provide you with some kind of handy infographic or flowchart that would help you cut through this increasingly crowded category and find the perfect myth adaptation for you. Instead, this is a somewhat desperate plea for someone to please make that flowchart for me, please, I’m begging you. I feel so overwhelmed right now.

I want to be perfectly clear: I’m not criticizing any of these books, or the bigger trend. For one, I haven’t read most of them, so I can’t offer any critique except to say that the covers look kind of samey? I did read and enjoy Circe, and I did a book event with Madeline Miller and found her lovely and extremely well-informed and happy to engage with me on some extremely niche classicist Odyssey concerns, like Butler’s Authoress of the Odyssey theory. And I think, overall, the trend of retelling Greek myths and centering the stories of the women of myth is a healthy and exciting one.

In her landmark 1985 article “Playing the Other: Theater, Theatricality, and the Feminine in Greek Drama,” Froma Zeitlin argued that even the most bad-ass tragic heroines are still subsumed into the heroic narrative arcs of men:

Women as individuals or chorus may give their names as titles to plays; female characters may occupy the center stage and leave a far more indelible emotional impression on their spectators than their male counterparts (Antigone, for example, with respect to Creon). But functionally women are never an end in themselves, and nothing changes for them once they have lived out their drama onstage. Rather, they play the roles of catalysts, agents, instruments, blockers, spoilers, destroyers, and sometimes helpers or saviors for the male characters.

A similar story definitely applies to women in epic — Circe is certainly not functionally an end in herself in the Odyssey. And that’s bullshit. There are so many awesomely weird and intense teen girls out there in the midst of their witchy Greek mythology phases right now — you know, these girls:

I am certified trustworthy (mermaids and horses aren’t for me)

Based on the demographics in the room of the Madeline Miller event I did, that’s Circe’s audience, and I love that for them (and all of us). I don’t currently believe there’s such a thing as too much rewriting of myth with an eye toward female subjectivity. After all, when you stop to think about it for even a moment, there’s something deeply silly about all of the great monster-slaying heroes of Greek myth. Heracles? Come on. These guys have main-character energy off the charts already. It’s long past time that the women who support, aid, and obstruct them be elevated from the status of collateral damage and take center stage. The horse/dragon/mermaid girls of the world demand it. Many of the novels I mentioned at the beginning of this newsletter are debuts, which makes me think that maybe the writers had their own myth girl phases not so long ago. I know when I was in the midst of my own mythology/Plantagenet dynasty/Agatha Christie/witch phase, I absolutely devoured The Penelopiad and Lavinia. I love that today’s eyeliner-addicted teens have more options.

And now, could they please convince me that these aren’t all exactly the same book? And tell me which one has lively and funny dialogue, doesn’t use rape as a plot device for character growth, and centers the bonds between female characters? One that feels like the writer had fun writing it? I will buy it so fast.

There was an article in the Guardian about this trend that asked when/if the market for these books would soon be saturated. This feels like a silly question. I don’t pretend to really understand the book industry, but it seems plausible that, if these books stop breaking out/don’t find their audiences, editors would start acquiring fewer of them. But also, people don’t ask when the market for stories about a troubled loner detective with a substance abuse problem solving murders is going to be saturated, right?

Also, teen girls read a lot. I pretty much read books like it’s my job these days, and even so, I think I was reading more pages per year when I was a teenager by a pretty wide margin. I mean, the Clan of the Cave Bear re-readings alone would bring you to thousands of pages a year.

I am definitely not arguing that there are too many of these books. I’m just saying that there are so many that I, personally, feel paralyzed by the multitude of choices, and the marketing language for them all is really similar (“for readers of Circe”? You don’t say!), and I honestly only have time to read one, max two of them this year in between my regular steady stream of queer and/or divorce memoirs and way, way too many Substacks.

So help me. Please. And if you’ve read any of these books, tell me what you did and didn’t like in the comments. It would be a kindness.