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This book brings together two lines of enquiry in recent criticism: the reception of ancient Greece and Rome, and women as writers and readers in the 19th century. A classical education has been characterized as almost an exclusively male prerogative, but women writers had a greater imaginative engagement with classical literature than has previously been acknowledged. To offer a more accurate impression of the influence of the classics in Victorian women's literary culture, women's difficulties in gaining access to classical learning are explored through biographical and fictional representations of the development of women's education from solitary study at home to compulsory classics at university. The restrictions which applied to women's classical learning liberated them from the repressive and sometimes alienating effects of a traditional classical education, enabling women writers to produce distinctive literary responses to the classical tradition. Women readers focused on image, plot, and character rather than grammar, leading to imaginative and often subversive reworkings of classical texts. Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot have been granted an exceptional status as 19th-century female classicists. This book places them in a literary tradition in which revising classical narratives in forms such as the novel and the dramatic monologue offered women the opportunity to express controversial ideas. The reworking of classical texts serves a variety of purposes: to validate women's claims to authorship, to demand access to education, to highlight feminist issues through the heroines of ancient tragedy, and to repudiate the warrior ethos of ancient epic.

With the telling and retelling of stories by the narrator and characters, Homer’s Odyssey seems to invite the reworking of episodes and characters in new forms. Modern poets favour the dramatic monologue for entering into dialogue with a revered canonical text, often in an irreverent or subversive manner. Dramatic monologues are crucial to the revisionist mythology of women writers, often representing female characters who are peripheral and largely silent in classical texts in order to articulate some element of the story that was previously untold. Poets such as Linda Pastan, Carol Ann Duffy, Louise Glück, and Judith Kazantzis use monologue and dialogue to create reworkings of the Odyssey that relocate Odysseus to the margins of the story and question the importance of his heroic adventures.

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