For centuries, the Greek Gorgon Medusa has been cast as a vicious monster, a beastly woman with writhing snakes for hair and a deadly gaze that turns living creatures to stone.
Several years ago, when Nataly Gruender was studying classics as an undergraduate at the University of Arizona, she started to wonder if there was more to Medusa’s story.
Scattered references in Greek and Roman works by Hesiod, Apollodorus and Ovid described her death at the hands of the hero Perseus, but also hinted at a fuller life. In Ovid’s telling, Medusa wasn’t born a monster, but was turned into one as punishment by the goddess Athena, after Medusa was raped by the sea-god Poseidon in Athena’s temple.
Drawing on the fragments she could find, and adding scenes to flesh out Medusa’s narrative, Gruender wrote her own version of the myth. “Often, you only really get to see her as a decapitated head in Perseus’ hand,” Gruender said. “I really wanted to give her a voice and tell the story from her perspective.”
She imagined a climactic moment in which Medusa confronts Athena and asks the goddess why she, the victim, was unjustly punished, and added a noncanonical love affair between Medusa and a female water nymph. “I’m queer, so I wanted to see that reflected in her,” Gruender said. “I was like, you know, she deserves one nice thing.”
Gruender’s debut novel, “Medusa,” which Grand Central will publish this August, is the latest fictional reworking of the Gorgon’s tale. The increasingly crowded sub-sub-genre includes novels like Natalie Haynes’s “Stone Blind,” Hannah Lynn’s “Athena’s Child,” Lauren J.A. Bear’s “Medusa’s Sisters,” Katherine Marsh’s middle grade novel “Medusa,” Claire Heywood’s “The Shadow of Perseus” and Jessie Burton’s young adult novel “Medusa: The Girl Behind the Myth.”
And Medusa is just one of a legion of female mythological figures who are getting literary makeovers. Following in the wake of blockbusters like Madeline Miller’s “Circe,” which spotlighted the powerful witch from Homer’s “Odyssey” and sold more than 2.5 million copies, there’s been a flood of novels featuring women from Greek mythology who have often been overlooked, maligned or sidelined as pawns in male heroes’ journeys.
For the women writing these feminist revisions, and the millions of readers enthralled by the stories, placing women at the center of familiar, ancient myths feels like a necessary and overdue corrective.
For most of recorded history, Greek and Roman mythology has been dominated by men, from ancient bards and dramatists like Homer, Euripides and Aeschylus, to the translators and scholars who have interpreted those myths in the centuries since. Female characters have either been relegated to the fringes, or filtered through the male gaze, depicted as helpless victims, sexual objects and war prizes. If they had any agency at all, women in myth were often cast as supernatural monsters like Circe and Medusa, or murderous villains like Medea and Clytemnestra.
To Miller, it makes sense that women are excavating ancient stories and giving new life to female characters whose perspectives have been elided.
“Overwhelmingly, the voices we hear from the ancient world are male,” she said. “It’s not just that the women in these stories lead oppressed lives, it’s that we don’t get their vision of what their lives look like.”
At the same time, these ancient stories retain their potency, culturally and psychologically. As long as myths continue to resonate, writers will extract fresh meaning from them.
Along with Circe and Medusa, other female villains from Greek epics and tragedies are getting resurrected and redeemed in fiction. The murderous Queen Clytemnestra, who killed both her husband, the warrior Agamemnon, and his war concubine, the Trojan princess Cassandra, gets center stage in novels by Costanza Casati and Susan C. Wilson. Medea — one of the most reviled figures in myth, who takes vengeance on her deceitful husband, Jason, by murdering her own children — has inspired recent fictional retellings by Rosie Hewlett and Eilish Quin.
“There’s a huge appetite for these stories because they have a massively archetypal quality,” said Haynes, a classicist turned novelist who is working on her own novelization of Medea.
The trend shows no signs of slowing: This summer, publishers are releasing a fresh wave of feminist Greek mythological reboots.
Claire North’s “The Last Song of Penelope,” due out in June, reimagines the story of Odysseus’ homecoming after the Trojan War from the perspective of his clever wife, Penelope, as she schemes behind the scenes to keep her family safe from the carnage. Caro De Robertis’s new novel, “The Palace of Eros,” out in August, reinvents the myth of Eros, the god of desire, and Psyche, the beautiful mortal he falls in love with. In De Robertis’s version, Eros is a nonbinary deity who presents as female and can change genders, a plot twist that adds new layers to the original story’s themes of forbidden love and desire.
And in “Hera,” also out in August, the best-selling novelist Jennifer Saint recasts the goddess as a powerful, cunning deity in her own right, rather than just the petty, jealous wife of Zeus. In Saint’s version, Hera feels herself every bit Zeus’ equal, but she is forced to marry him after he tricks her by disguising himself as a small injured bird, then overpowering and raping her. From then on, she is bent on revenge against not only her unfaithful husband, but also the nymphs and goddesses he pursues.
“It was important to me to write a woman who is not likable, who is relentlessly ambitious and striving for power and control, and considers that to be her birthright as much as Zeus’,” said Saint, whose previous novels have reanimated female mythological figures like Ariadne, Elektra and Atalanta. “We see Hera through the worst misogynist stereotypes; so often she’s presented as spiteful and vindictive, as nagging Zeus and holding him back, and it’s so deeply unfair. Does Hera look different if we see her through a female lens?”
There’s a long literary tradition of revising and reimagining Greek myths. Romans like Virgil and Ovid adapted these stories. Ancient myths figure in the plays of Shakespeare, in poetry by Derek Walcott and Louise Glück, and in novels by Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ali Smith and Rick Riordan, whose Percy Jackson series has sold more than 100 million copies globally. The ancient Greeks and Romans themselves were prone to spinning new versions of their lore, which often morphed from storyteller to storyteller, leaving no fixed or final version.
Still, the recent rise of Greek mythological retellings with an overtly feminist lens stands out for the sheer volume of novels and the seemingly bottomless appetite for mythological fare among both readers and publishers.
Several factors are driving the genre’s explosion. Many of these novels have arrived in the wake of #MeToo, and may hold appeal because the narratives give voice and agency to female characters who are victims of sexual violence and assault.
Some writers are taking myths in which women are victimized, subjugated and objectified, and turning them into stories of romantic and sexual empowerment. The myth of Hades and Persephone — an unsettling story about how the god of the underworld abducted young Persephone, dragged her into the bowels of the earth and forced her to marry him — has been reimagined as a steamy love story in two best-selling series: the “Hades x Persephone Saga,” a spicy romantasy series by Scarlett St. Clair that has sold more than a million print copies, and Rachel Smythe’s graphic novel series “Lore Olympus,” a blockbuster that has more than 2.3 million copies in print.
Queer and gender-flipped versions of Greek myths are part of the new landscape too. Miller’s debut novel, “The Song of Achilles,” which came out more than a decade ago but more recently found a huge audience through TikTok, and went on to sell more than three million copies, centers on a romance between the warrior Achilles and his comrade-in-arms Patroclus. The young adult novelist and TikTok star Bea Fitzgerald’s forthcoming novel, “The End Crowns All,” due out in July from Penguin U.K., is a Sapphic young adult romance in which Helen and Cassandra come together and rewrite their fates to stop the fall of Troy.
Another addition to the canon, Elyse John’s new novel “Orphia and Eurydicius,” retells the story of the poet Orpheus’ journey to the underworld to rescue the woman he loves, Eurydice. In John’s version, Orphia is a female poet who travels to Hades’s realm to save her bisexual male lover, Eurydicius — a radical change that puts a woman in the hero’s role and scrambles gender stereotypes.
“By changing Orpheus into a woman, I could explore what it means to be a creator-heroine, a woman using storytelling to take on the gods,” John said.
Greek mythology has also seeped into other corners of pop culture, showing up in TV, comics, graphic novels and video games, making it feel more accessible and less like an elite, scholarly field.
For younger generations raised on superhero blockbusters and ever-expanding I.P.-derived cinematic universes with endless reboots and character spinoffs, novelizations of myths may hold a similar appeal: You’ve seen this character, but you’ve never gotten her side of the story.
New translations of classical texts by women are also helping to reshape the popular understanding of Western myths, and are in turn inspiring novelists.
In Stephanie McCarter’s 2022 translation of Ovid’s “Metamorphosis,” a Latin poem that recounts famous tales of transformation, love and violence, McCarter uses blunt language to describe the gods’ sexual pursuit of women, labeling assaults as rape, rather than resorting to the euphemisms often used in earlier translations, like “ravished” and “plundered.”
The classicist Emily Wilson’s translations of Homer’s “The Odyssey” and “The Iliad” won acclaim, and stirred some controversy, for using plain language to describe the subjugation of women, and by avoiding sexist phrases used by male translators. Whereas some previous versions called the servant girls in Odysseus’ household who were seduced by Penelope’s suitors “sluts” or “whores” — words with sexist overtones that aren’t present in Homer’s original verses — Wilson calls them “slave women.”
Wilson said novelizations of Greek myths appeal to readers in part because they have the patina of high culture, but may feel less intimidating than translations of the originals.
“People are a little bit afraid of ancient literature,” said Wilson, who in addition to translating classics is also working on her own fictional version of Trojan War stories. “The ‘you go girl’ feminism thing — you may think she’s a victim but actually she’s a goddess — is a very relatable, inspiring thing to many young readers.”
Not everyone appreciates mythological makeovers. Some classical purists have taken to social media to criticize new translations and feminist revisions, arguing that these new works are distorting ancient stories by imposing a feminist agenda. A critique of the genre in The New Statesman by Finn McRedmond last year argued that feminist revisions tend to be one-note, and often misread the stories they attempt to unearth: “It is difficult to extract honest feminist parable from stories written in a world that wouldn’t recognize the concept,” she wrote.
Helen Morales, a professor of Hellenic studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said that while some recent feminist versions have preserved the moral complexity of these myths, others may go too far in seeking to placate modern readers with uplifting stories of female empowerment.
“Part of the appeal of myth is that it’s complex and unpredictable,” said Morales, author of “Antigone Rising,” which explores how Greek and Roman myths have been reclaimed and reinterpreted to speak to contemporary concerns. “If it’s rendered in a way that makes readers complacent, or reaffirms what we know or what we want to hear, I don’t think that’s good for myth, and it’s not good for feminism either.”
Others complain that the genre has become oversaturated — like any popular cultural trend, the explosion of mythological retellings has yielded works that vary widely in quality, and in their fidelity to the originals.
Still, for ardent fans of these stories, and the writers producing them, Greek myths seem to offer endless possibilities for reinterpretation.
“There’s no final word on anything, because language is always changing, so there’s no definitive myth,” said Miller, who is currently working on a new novel about Persephone and Demeter, her mother. “These were fluid texts right from the beginning.”
And for now, readers continue to crave new vantage points on female characters — and the archives are still full of mythological women worthy of their own epics, Miller said.
“They could all have their own novels,” she said.
