Illustration by Nikki Ernst
If you’ve stepped into a bookshop recently you’ve no doubt spotted them – mounded on display tables, their distinctive covers awash in laurel leaves, meander patterns, gold leaf and gently serifed all-caps type.
Novels that retell myths, particularly Greek ones, from the point of view of familiar and lesser-known female characters have been having a protracted moment. The past five years alone have seen books told from the perspective of Clytemnestra, Elektra, Medusa, Medusa’s sisters, Penelope, Ariadne, Psyche, Phaedra and Medea, among others. Authors are experimenting in other ways as well. Elyse John’s Orphia and Eurydicius, for instance, reinterprets the underworld tale by gender-swapping its characters.
And so, it seems a bit ironic that the publishers, editors and booksellers I spoke to about the phenomenon all unequivocally pinned its origins to one of the few recent Greek retellings that isn’t female-centred: Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles, which reimagines the myth of Achilles from the point of view of his male lover, Patroclus.
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The novel won critical acclaim, and the Orange Prize (now the Women’s Prize) in 2012. But bigger things were to come. Nine years later, The Song of Achilles went viral on BookTok, a TikTok subcommunity that, if you’re not familiar with it, is a bit like Greek mythology itself: vast, mysterious and conducive to magic (in the sense that its denizens can make an overnight bestseller of a book that has languished on store shelves for years).
In 2020, after its BookTok debut, 26,000 people bought The Song of Achilles in Canada. The next year, 101,000 bought it – a more than 250-per-cent increase, and massive numbers for this country. Indigo, in concert with the book’s publisher, HarperCollins, ended up producing a special edition of the novel that also sold “incredibly well,” according to Amanda Gauthier, the store’s director of print experience.
(Getting sales figures for the genre as a whole is a challenge, since booksellers and data-gatherers tend not to use “retellings” as a stand-alone category. Instead, most fall under multiple genres such as historical fiction, literary fiction, fantasy or folklore – which is also part of the reason the category keeps expanding and finding new readers.)
Miller’s 2018 follow-up, Circe, is narrated from a female point of view and readers enthusiastically migrated to it after having their appetites whetted by Achilles.
Illustration by Nikki Ernst
With the exception of Margaret Atwood, whose The Penelopiad came out in 2005, many of the genre’s best practitioners are Brits. Prominent among the latter is Natalie Haynes, whose The Children of Jocasta, a retelling of Oedipus and Antigone, came out in 2017, and was quickly followed in 2019 by A Thousand Ships (the Trojan war, retold from multiple female perspectives) and Stone Blind (POV Medusa).
(Jocasta is being reissued this fall, with publisher HarperCollins using the occasion to replace the book’s original cover with a laurel-leafed blue-and-gold one that comfortably aligns it with the genre’s current aesthetic.)
Pat Barker – best known for her trilogy of First World War novels (Regeneration etc.) – wrote a duology presenting the Trojan War from the perspective of Briseis, one of Achilles’s war prizes from the Trojan War, while Claire North (real name Catherine Webb) produced an entire trilogy reimagining the events of the Iliad and the Odyssey through Penelope’s eyes. It hasn’t hurt that Emily Wilson’s recent translations of Homer’s epics – the first by a woman – have been critical and media sensations as well.
Given that the genre gets so much of its fuel from BookTok, it’s no surprise that its readers tend to be female and young – between 17 and 30. Having grown up with Harry Potter and Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, most are entirely comfortable with magic, gods and alternate worlds.
As much as readers are finding these books on BookTok, Indigo’s Gauthier says that most prefer to shop for them in a physical store. Toronto’s indie chain Book City confirmed the same. They’re also likely to show up for author signings and, after reading the books, go online and write substantial, considered reviews.
Gauthier believes the genre’s nod to academia and the diligent research it requires is a strong part of its attraction. Readers like the fact that a book that deviates from a myth requires an understanding of what is being deviated from. And indeed, many of its writers – Natalie Haynes, Madeline Miller, Jennifer Saint, Sophie Keetch, Costanza Casati – are either classicists or have other relevant academic bona fides.
A kind of Greek-retellings effect has benefited older books outside the genre. Gauthier and her colleagues were initially mystified, for example, when Donna Tartt’s 1992 novel The Secret History, about a group of elite American college students whose Svengali-like professor gets them involved in a murder, suddenly blew up on BookTok. They then made the connection: The students in the novel are studying, and obsessed with, Greek antiquity and classics.
Why the enduring appeal of feminist Greek retellings? Shamin Alli, senior director of sales at HarperCollins – which, in addition to The Song of Achilles, publishes several key titles in the genre, including several by Haynes – believes it taps into a general hunger for books that give voice to those, including women, who’ve been marginalized from classical literature and history.
“The beauty of these books is that people come to them for so many different reasons – you may already have a familiarity with the original text, or you may not – but everyone can enjoy them,” Alli said.
Last year did see a slight flattening in the sales of Greek retellings, something Alli attributes, in part, to a rise in competition from publishers seeking a space in the genre by catering to the same readership.
Editor Amanda Ferreira loves Greek retellings – her university minor was in ancient Greek and Roman studies, and she recently returned from a bucket-list trip to Greece – but she suspects the genre may be nearing its saturation point. In 2021, she was brought on by Random House to build out the publisher’s fantasy and speculative fiction list, much of which consists of reimaginings and retellings.
As a result, Ferreira has started asking her writers to think outside the Greek box. Initially, that led to a lot of pitches for books set in ancient Rome, which Ferreira has found a difficult sell, possibly because the books lean historical rather than magical.
But her instincts seem to be proving correct. Ferreira’s first acquisition for Random House was Morgan Is My Name by Welsh writer Sophie Keetch, a retelling of Arthurian legend from the point of view of its prime villainess, Morgan le Fay.
A huge success in terms of sales and buzz, Morgan quickly paved the way for a follow-up, Le Fay. And the final entry in what will be a trilogy will come out next summer. Ferreira also helped oversee the recent publication of a Nova-Scotia-set feminist retelling of Celtic- and Norse-based myth The Selkie Wife called A Sweet Sting of Salt by Toronto-based writer Rose Sutherland.
Testament to the genre’s mytho-geographic adaptability, some of the most popular recent female-centred retellings have been based on East Asian legends. Two duologies – Sue Lynn Tan’s Daughter of the Moon Goddess series, about the Chinese goddess Chang’e, and Shelley Parker-Chan’s Radiant Emperor series, set in 14th-century Mongol-ruled China – were bestsellers in Canada and abroad.
Among those helping to move the genre beyond its Hellenocentrism are Canadians Kate Heartfield and Tamara Goranson. Based in Ottawa, Heartfield has written retellings that venture into 14th-century Flanders (The Chatelaine) and Norse mythology (The Valkyrie).
Norse mythology is also the basis of Goranson’s Vinland Viking trilogy, whose first book, The Voyage of Freydis, is narrated by Freydis Eiriksdottir, the only woman to lead an expedition – specifically to Vinland, a.k.a. L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, where she helped establish a Viking settlement.
“I felt an overwhelming elation walking in the footsteps of this Norsewoman whom I had reimagined, almost like I was bridging millennia and breathing in Freydis’s medieval story that connected me to a bygone era,” says Victoria-based, Scandinavian-rooted Goranson of the experience of writing the trilogy, which was inspired by a 2014 visit to a Viking exhibition at the Royal BC Museum.
Canada’s best-known female-retelling remains, of course, Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2005). When she was initially commissioned to write the first instalment in Scottish publisher Canongate’s myth-retelling series, Atwood had chosen a Canadian myth, “but since nobody knew the original, I would have had to tell the original before doing a rendition of it.”
So she opted to retell a story that had long sat with her: that of Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, but with a narrative twist. The story would be narrated by Penelope from the underworld, after she’s dead.
In most versions of her story, Penelope is held up as the virtuous, pious wife. But how virtuous could she really be, Atwood asked herself, given how long she’d managed to deceive her suitors in Odysseus’s absence?
“Odysseus was also a hardcore liar,” Atwood said recently, while talking about the writing of The Penelopiad. “And it interested me, when they got together, how much lying they did together.”
Any other revelations? “I will never again write a book with a title I don’t know how to pronounce.”