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Emily Hauser is the author of the new book Penelope's Bones: A New History of Homer's World through the Women Written Out of It. Her other books include the novel For the Most Beautiful. She is a senior lecturer in classics and ancient history at the University of Exeter in the UK.
Q: What inspired you to write Penelope’s Bones, and how did you choose the women to include in the book?
A: I have read and studied Homer’s epics – the Iliad and Odyssey – for decades now. I still remember that first thrill of reading the Odyssey in ancient Greek, and it’s an excitement, a fascination with these millennia-old texts that has never left me.
Yet I had always felt there was a problem at the heart of the epics: on the one hand, women are hugely important to the stories. Just think of Helen of Troy, whose seizure by Paris, prince of Troy, starts the entire Trojan War; or Penelope, to whom Odysseus needs to return to vouchsafe his role as king of Ithaca.
On the other hand, we see women again and again being pushed to the sidelines by the androcentric thrust of the epics’ narrative, that focus on the “stories of the glories of men” (that’s a phrase from the Greek that describes what they do: klea andrōn).
So I wanted to find a way to bring the women back to the foreground, to find out more about their stories, to resist the narrative that they don’t get a say.
And that was how I started thinking that we might tell this story another way: that we might begin with the women of history instead, the real experiences of women written into bones and objects and texts, that tell us something about the lives of the historical women who might have influenced the stories and the myths the men ended up telling.
In terms of how I chose the women, I wanted to make sure I had a sweep of as many of the women from the Iliad and Odyssey as possible. That meant surveying not just mortal women and queens like Helen and Penelope, but also goddesses like Hera and Athena, nymphs like Circe and Calypso, and enslaved women like Eurycleia.
My aim in rewriting a narrative of the epics through them is that one strand of the book is like reading the Iliad and Odyssey, told through the women.
At the same time, each of these women also dovetailed with an experience of historical women in the Late Bronze Age world that I’m teasing out – since the starting point of the book is always women’s history.
In so many ways it was an extraordinary experience of the historical evidence speaking into Homer – so that, as I was discovering recent interpretations of DNA or new archaeological discoveries, I could see how each of these would weave into the later tales of the women of the Trojan War. And the book just came together.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: For me, Penelope’s Bones is all about the inherently difficult juxtaposition of a legendary, mythical, epic character (Penelope) and the real, tangible nature of bones in the archaeological record, and the amount of evidence that archaeologists are able to unravel from them to reveal the real lives of women.
It’s attempting to get at the book’s heart, which is using archaeology and new advances in science as a starting point towards the silenced women of epic and myth.
Interestingly, it’s worth noting that the book has a different title in the UK: while it’s Penelope’s Bones in the USA, in the UK it’s Mythica. Each title points to something different in what the book is doing, whether that’s rewriting the myths through women, or articulating a new way of looking at legendary women through archaeology, science and history.
Q: How did you research the book, and did you learn anything that especially surprised you?
A: I’m a scholar of the ancient world by training (I did my Ph.D. in Classics at Yale), so research is one of the bits I love.
What was amazing about this book is that I came to the material as a philologist – which means someone who is trained in the ancient languages – and so the process of writing the book was kind of my discovery of everything that archaeology and science has to offer when we are able to put stories and experiences to what might look like dry and dusty bones or teeth or burials, in complementary ways to what we do as readers of texts.
I hope that excitement comes through, and my readers can take that voyage of discovery with me.
There was so much about writing the book that surprised me – above all, the coincidences that I kept running across, where a lead I was following I hadn’t even known would be helpful would have elements that spoke so directly to the women of Homer.
I think Calypso’s sail was the biggest one for me. Calypso – the nymph who, we’re told, keeps Odysseus captive for seven years on her island on his return – had always bothered me: the way she’s presented as an obstacle to Odysseus’ path seemed so motivated by the male narrative, but I didn’t have a way to push back against it.
Then I was reading about modern experimental archaeological approaches to textiles – where archaeologists recreate the tools that ancient women would have used, in order to learn about the kinds of fabrics they made and the time they took – and I found that it would have taken multiple years for a single woman to spin and weave a sail.
And something clicked. What if Calypso wasn’t keeping Odysseus hostage after all – but if she, rather, was just busy making him a sail to help get him off her island?
It’s this kind of rethinking, through women’s work – and through making the effort and the time of women’s work visible – that made me realise there is such a different way of looking at these tales.
Q: The writer Jennifer Saint called the book a “stirring, enlightening, and fascinating exploration of the real lives of women written with expert knowledge, wit, and poetic flair.” What do you think of that description?
A: I’m so grateful for that wonderful endorsement, from a writer as accomplished and thoughtful as Jennifer Saint is.
I have a background as a novelist, and so I’m really interested in the ways that we can intertwine fiction and nonfiction, the story-making of experience and voices that fiction provides with the evidence and on-the-ground reality of history, as a way to address the silences of women in the archive.
Each chapter of the book opens with a fictional re-imagining of the woman I’m discussing, before we dive straight into an archaeological discovery and its ramifications for understanding the women of the past. So Jennifer’s description means a lot in terms of acknowledging what I’m trying to do.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: My current project is an introductory handbook to women in Homer, which I hope will be an interesting way into the ancient texts and how Homer represents the female figures there. I’ve also got plenty of other ideas and projects on the horizon ahead, so stay tuned!
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: If you’d like to order a copy of Penelope’s Bones or are thinking of gifting it for the holiday season (thank you!), we can all do with a little financial help, so here’s a little holiday gift: my publisher is offering it at 30 percent off on their website (here) with the code UCPNEW. I hope you enjoy it!
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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