So a while ago at the Poisoned Pen I pinch hit as host for Barbara Peters, who was slugging back Singapore Slings in the bar at the Raffles Hotel in, you guessed it, Singapore at the time. We’re still not speaking to her.

The guest du soir was Paula Lafferty, of the bestseller The Once and Future Queen, a modern retelling of the story of Guenevere.

Guenevere is usually the merest of footnotes and a pretty trite one, too–cheated on her husband with his best friend, got caught and ruined Camelot, exeunt. Lafferty offers a more modern, nuanced take.

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You can watch Lafferty talk about it
here and here.

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But what really interests me here is the long line of modern writers Lafferty is joining, who are mostly women mining the backstory of the literary canon of the Western world and giving women characters their own voice for the first time. Like Clare North’s The Songs of Penelope trilogy, a retelling of the trials and tribulations of Odysseus’ wife Penelope, who is attempting by guile and obfuscation to keep hold of her husband’s estate long enough for him to get home. (I always thought Telemachus was an asshole and I was happy to see North agreed with me.)

In the Seldovia Public Library was where I first found a copy of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, a brilliant book. I still have my copy on the reference shelf, and not only because of the marvelous black-and-white drawings by Steele Savage.

Herein it was I first read about Penelope, about the goddesses Hera and Athena and Aphrodite and Demeter, about the Trojan women who one and all met such horrendous ends (gang rape and murder was the inevitable outcome of every classical battle, or any battle of any time really), and of course the Greek women left behind to run things while their men took a decade to defeat Troy.

One of that last was Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s wife. Spoiler alert: She killed him when he got back, as well as the unfortunate Trojan woman Cassandra, whom the god Apollo cursed with telling the truth and never being believed, all because she turned him down.

But back to Clytemnestra’s motivation in murdering her king and husband: Because due to shenanigans on the part of those continually pesky gods, the Greek invasion fleet had been becalmed by the goddess Artemis, who demanded that Agamemnon sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia for a fair wind to Troy. Which he promptly does.

Iphigenia was Clytemnestra’s daughter, too, please note, and Clytemnestra was not the forgiving sort. She was a MOM. Any jury other than Orestes’ would have called it justifiable homicide and turned her loose.

N.B.: Yes, yes, I know, ostensibly this was all about Helen of Troy, who appears off screen in North’s book and not to her advantage, either.

Myself, if I’d been on the scene of the murder I’d have held Clytemnestra’s coat.

Which I did, in the nineteenth Kate Shugak novel, Restless in the Grave, where I took the story of Clytemnestra and used it to show what justifiable mariticide looks like in the present day. Sue me.

I was just following in the footsteps of literary fashion these days.

And if you only have fifteen minutes…

#thiswritinglife Chatter Kate Shugak edith hamilton mythology paula lafferty restless in the grave the once and future king