Reimagining the Women of the Past: DAUGHTERS OF SPARTA

The idea for my debut novel, Daughters of Sparta, came to me while I was studying the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome at university. Having always been drawn to myths and legends, I had first embarked upon a BA in Classical Civilisation at the University of Warwick, and fell so much in love with the subject that I stayed on to complete a master’s degree in Ancient Visual and Material Culture.

I found myself endlessly fascinated with discovering the ways in which people had lived, the values they had held, the stories they had told. But as well as sparking delight and curiosity, I was also confronted with worlds that were unfair, unequal, and quite often unsettling.

As is common for students of the past, I have often wondered what it would be like to live there, while in the same instant knowing I would not want to. The ancient world was for many a dangerous and powerless place, and not least for women. And what is more the women, both historical and mythological, who railed against this powerlessness to seize some agency of their own were often vilified in the stories told about them.

Prickled by these injustices, I decided to take two such figures, the infamous Helen of Troy and her sister Klytemnestra, and retell their stories in full, to give a window into their experience, to humanise and vindicate them. And so this is where my research began – with these two anti-heroines, as the ancients might have viewed them, and the desire to understand the world they might have inhabited.

I found inspiration in my archaeological research, in reimagining Bronze Age Greece and the settings of the quasi-historical Trojan War. I was interested in the domestic spaces these women occupied, in what they saw and smelled and tasted, in how they spent their hours. My imagination was fired most of all, however, by the ancient texts I had read: the grim tragedy of Aeschylus, the heart-breaking pathos of Euripides, and of course the epic tales of Homer.

Amid the stories of male pride and glory, these ancient writers give us tantalising glimpses into the characters and experiences of Helen and Klytemnestra. I wanted to expand on these moments of empathy and make these women the heroes in their own story. In Daughters of Sparta, though I was retelling one of the most famous stories ever told, I also wanted to create a new narrative and tell the parts of the story that had been left unspoken. I wanted to take these legendary women and make them real, to see them not only in their most famous moments, but in all the moments that had led them there.

In the novel we see how both sisters lack control over their own lives – who they will marry, where they will live, whether they will have children and how many. This last point is one that has always struck me when imagining the experience of women in the past. Even in our modern age the prospect of pregnancy, childbirth, and parenthood is filled with risks and worries. In the ancient world these risks were far, far greater, with the mortality rate for both mother and child terrifyingly high by modern standards.

Add to this the fact that, should both survive the birth, there was a significant chance that the child would not survive past infancy, and it makes me think that if I myself had lived in the ancient world I would have chosen never to have children at all. But did women really ever have that option? We know that they tried to gain some control over their fertility, as recipes for contraceptives and abortifacients have been found in some of the world’s oldest writings.

Ancient Egyptian papyri, for example, record contraceptive remedies involving honey, acacia leaves, and even crocodile dung. Such methods would have been semi-reliable at best and, in the case of abortifacients, often quite dangerous. And so these primal fears, which must have been shared by women throughout the millennia, of uncontrollable fertility, of child bearing, and of losing the precious children for whom one had risked so much, became one of the themes which I wanted to explore in the novel.

Helen and Klytemnestra are far more than fearful victims though. These women became infamous for the very fact that they were agents of their own fortune. This is what drew me to these characters, and in my own retelling I wanted to show not only the stifling patriarchal world that they inhabited, but the ways in which they pushed against it. In Daughters of Sparta both sisters, in different ways and for different reasons, change the course that has been set for them. They go against the expectations of their sex, breaking rules and seizing new identities. They do all they can to make the best of their situation. Above all they are trying to survive, to protect themselves and their loved ones, and to build lives they can enjoy and not just endure.

Daughters of Sparta will be published this summer (June 22nd in the US/Canada, July 22nd in the UK) and is available for pre-order now.

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DAUGHTERS OF SPARTA

For millennia, men have told the legend of the woman whose face launched a thousand ships—but now it’s time to hear her side of the story. Daughters of Sparta is a tale of secrets, love, and tragedy from the women behind mythology’s most devastating war, the infamous Helen and her sister Klytemnestra.

As princesses of Sparta, Helen and Klytemnestra have known nothing but luxury and plenty. With their high birth and unrivaled beauty, they are the envy of all of Greece. But such privilege comes at a cost. While still only girls, the sisters are separated and married to foreign kings of their father’s choosing—
Helen remains in Sparta to be betrothed to Menelaos, and Klytemnestra is sent alone to an unfamiliar land to become the wife of the powerful Agamemnon. Yet even as Queens, each is only expected to do two things: birth an heir and embody the meek, demure nature that is expected of women.

But when the weight of their husbands’ neglect, cruelty, and ambition becomes too heavy to bear, Helen and Klytemnestra must push against the constraints of their society to carve new lives for themselves, and in doing so, make waves that will ripple throughout the next three thousand years.

Daughters of Sparta is a vivid and illuminating reimagining of the Siege of Troy, told through the perspectives of two women whose voices have been ignored for far too long.

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing