Monday, September 27, 2021

Bleak and impressive

Lucy Hughes-Hallett reviews The Women of Troy, by Pat Barker, at The Guardian.

"In this sequel [to her The Silence of the Girls], Barker has stepped free of the masculinist epic tradition. Briseis is still the narrator, but Barker has left the Iliad behind, with its insistence on the glory and the pathos of warfare. The Women of Troy draws mainly on a very different source – Euripides’ tragedy The Trojan Women. This is a story not of conflict but of its aftermath."

See Euripedes, Plays, Great Books of the Western World (first edition, 52 Vol., 1952) volume 5, (second edition, 60 Vol., 1990) volume 4.

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