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Personally, I think it’s really interesting to think about needs and possibilities and how the ancients navigated those, both well and badly. I can appreciate the desire to tell stories that empower modern feminists, but then what is the reason to tell a story from a past and culture that the author does not want to take the time to understand in a nuanced way? And to be honest, there’s a lot more I could say, where she imposes a lot of attitudes that are clearly about modern not ancient life. There is so much cringe. I think if you’re going to enter a culture that is not your own, you have to be willing to see beyond your own resentments and anger and have the willingness and ability to see nuance and respect things that are different from you. Flatlay of the hardcover edition of Daughter of Sparta next to a teapot and tea dish with a wolf design painted on it. Book Review
I also loved seeing the blending of other Greek myths that the author weaves into this story. You’ll recognize many famous faces such as Theseus, the Minotaur, King Minos, Hippolyta, the Sphinx of Thebes, and many more gods and goddesses. Claire M. Andrews, Daughter of Sparta Characters & Romance Close-up of a Greek dish hand painted with Dionysus on it, next to a notebook and the hardcover edition of Daughter of Sparta. This brings up one of my main issues with Daughters of Sparta: By removing the gods from the story entirely as agents, Heywood removes a prime mover within the Homeric narrative. This accords with some modern views, but it denies an important feature (among others) of the myths, which is that they existed to explain the human condition, and central to this condition was a dynamic between immortal power and mortal bodies. What differentiates gods from humans in the mythical world is that the gods are more powerful and eternal. Thus humans, being weaker and mortal, can become instruments through which gods achieve their ends. A powerful wind can change a navy’s plans, for example, putting it on a disastrous course. The cycles of nature dictate farming and harvesting. And so on. In the Iliad, Helen gets pushed around and threatened by Aphrodite, who wishes Paris to be rewarded for having chosen her as the “most beautiful” and engineers events accordingly. Klytemnestra becomes the instrument through which Agamemnon is punished by the gods, for various offenses. Heywood tells us these two women were blamed, but ancient sources are far more nuanced. In the Iliad, Helen blames herself, but the Trojans do not. Not so in Heywood. Her Trojans despise and blame Helen for having brought destruction to their gates. Here is Agamemnon’s full reply (Richmond Lattimore’s translation, underlines are mine to correspond with what Heywood extracts from, if I’m not mistaken, Emily Wilson’s translation):Such privilege comes at a high price, though, and their destinies are not theirs to command. While still only girls they are separated and married off to legendary foreign kings Agamemnon and Menelaos, never to meet again. Their duty is now to give birth to the heirs society demands and be the meek, submissive queens their men expect. I very much enjoyed the fact that Heywood chose to split the focus of the novel between the two sisters. While both Klytemnestra and Helen are, of course, famous individually, I daresay that relatively few people recognize that they were, in fact, siblings. In bringing them both into the frame as part of the same story, Heywood allows us to see how firmly intertwined their fates were from the beginning and how much they remained so throughout their lives. After all, were it not for Helen’s decision to abscond with Paris for Troy, Kyltemnestra wouldn’t have lost her daughter and wouldn’t have been driven to For millennia, two women have been blamed for the fall of a mighty civilisation - but now it's time to hear their side of the story....
As princesses of Sparta, Helen and Klytemnestra have known nothing but luxury and plenty. With their high birth and unrivalled beauty, they are the envy of all of Greece. Heywood leaves the gods out of the story, other than as vague powers to whom characters refer, in this sense taking a quasi-historical/materialist/psychoanalytic rather than fantasy approach to the Trojan war myth. The choices she makes to achieve this approach toward the characters and their experiences are interesting to think about, and her prose is engaging. I believe this novel will find an enthusiastic audience among readers who enjoy modern women’s narratives dressed in ancient Greek costumes. Brilliantly compelling . . . the perfect balance between historical authenticity and characters who I really connected withOdysseus replies, “Shame it is, how most terrible Zeus of the wide brows/from the beginning has been hateful to the seed of Atreus/through the schemes of women. Many of us died for the sake of Helen,/and when you were far, Klyaimestra plotted treason against you.” Lines 436-439 But I feel so torn. On the one hand, I completely agree with you that “reclaimed” is a weird/bad word choice here. For one thing, these are legendary, not (necessarily) historical figures, so what is there to reclaim? We wouldn’t say we’re “reclaiming” the story of “Cinderella”, for instance….
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