Items25The creator’s order
  1. 1Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) 8.0/10 on Open LibraryPublished 1 Jan 1966Rhys takes the woman confined in Jane Eyre's attic and gives her a Caribbean life, a name and a marriage shaped by money and colonial power. Antoinette's story changes what the reader can accept as an adequate explanation of her supposed madness. Knowing Brontë's central marriage plot makes the…0i
  2. 2Foe (1986)Foe (1986) 6.0/10 on Open LibraryPublished 1 Jan 1986Coetzee rewrites Robinson Crusoe around Susan Barton's effort to have her island experience recorded by Daniel Foe. His professional interest in shaping a narrative threatens her account, while Friday's inability to speak leaves a deeper problem unresolved. Whose experience can she legitimately…0
  3. 3The Penelopiad (2005)The Penelopiad (2005) 6.5/10 on Open LibraryPublished 1 Jan 2005Penelope has a kingdom to manage, a son to raise and suitors to resist while Odysseus is away. Atwood gives that familiar waiting wife a witty account of her own, then makes the fate of her twelve maids a question that heroic homecoming cannot neatly settle. The Odyssey's outline is useful…0
  4. 4Circe (2018)Circe (2018) 8.3/10 on Open LibraryPublished 1 Jan 2018The sorceress encountered during Odysseus's travels becomes the centre of an extended life, with craft, solitude, desire and motherhood given epic weight. Miller asks what agency can mean for a woman whom gods and men repeatedly seek to control. This is an expansive character story, drawing on…0
  5. 5The silence of the girls (2018)The silence of the girls (2018) 9.0/10 on Open LibraryPublished 1 Jan 2018Briseis's captivity changes the significance of the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon: the woman treated as a prize has an existence beyond their injured honour. Barker pays attention to the labour and relationships among women living in the Greek camp. It is a severe account of war and…0
  6. 6A Thousand Ships (2019)A Thousand Ships (2019) 8.0/10 on Open LibraryPublished 1 Jan 2019Haynes spreads the Trojan War across women, girls and goddesses whose experiences cannot be gathered into one heroine's life. Victory and defeat produce different kinds of loss, including for people far from the battlefield. Compared with The Silence of the Girls and its concentration on captives…0
  7. 7Lavinia (2008)Lavinia (2008) 6.8/10 on Open LibraryPublished 1 Jan 2008Lavinia scarcely has a voice in the Aeneid, although the struggle over her marriage helps determine its outcome. Le Guin gives her a life in ancient Italy and makes the apparently passive prize a person confronting duty, desire and the future promised to others. The novel is in conversation with…0
  8. 8Girl Meets Boy (2007)Girl Meets Boy (2007) 10.0/10 on Open LibraryPublished 1 Jan 2007Two sisters working for a bottled-water business encounter different possibilities for the lives they are expected to lead. Smith brings Ovid's Iphis into that contemporary world, making gender and desire less obedient to the categories around them. The short novel combines romantic energy with…0
  9. 9Home Fire (2017)Home Fire (2017) 8.0/10 on Open LibraryPublished 1 Jan 2017Antigone's collision between family obligation and state authority becomes a story about a British Muslim family, citizenship and the costs of political loyalty. Shamsie's contemporary setting gives the old conflict concrete institutions and public consequences. Knowledge of the play helps reveal…0i
  10. 10The Palace of Illusions (2008)The Palace of Illusions (2008) 8.4/10 on Open LibraryPublished 1 Jan 2008Panchaali, also known as Draupadi, sets the scale of this Mahabharata through her childhood, relationships, desires and political entanglements. The epic world remains immense, but its conflicts are experienced through an inward life that cannot be reduced to her place in a dynasty. A basic account…0