Just as Penelope unraveled and re-wove her famous rug, refusing to follow the narrative men chose for her, Nell Wright restitched the stories of eleven women from Greek myth. When the lives of unsung heroines like Clytemnestra and Penelope are told from a woman’s point of view, common and all too contemporary threads appear.
“I knew Nell Wright when we were children. She was the ringleader of our group, putting on plays she’d written for us, or writing poems about these Greek characters who have, once more, found delightful voice in her imagination in these stories.”
Nell Wright taught Latin in high schools and colleges for forty years. Her study of ancient Greek, especially details of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, infuse these narratives. Combine this training with her mother’s feminism, and the characters in Daughters of Homer seem inevitable. Nell’s angle on Greek women was also inspired by the people she met in Greek villages. She has published a dozen fictional stories for children based on characters found in ancient writers. This is her first collection for adults.
