Recommendations
Books Like The Penelopiad
Best books to read after The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad is the feminist Homeric retelling — Penelope and the twelve hanged maids narrating from Hades. These recommendations continue the Atwood canon, explore the tradition of the feminist myth retelling, or offer companion reading in the tradition of the novel that gives a voice to the women whom canonical literature silenced.
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The Handmaid's Tale
by Margaret Atwood
The essential companion Atwood — Offred in the theocratic Republic of Gilead; shares The Penelopiad's interest in a woman who is constrained by the institutional power of the men around her and who survives by telling her story in the most unflattering possible terms to the system that constrained her.
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Alias Grace
by Margaret Atwood
The companion historical Atwood — Grace Marks, the nineteenth-century Canadian murderess, whose reliability as a narrator is perpetually in question; shares The Penelopiad's interest in a woman whose true story has been buried under the narratives others have imposed on her.
- 3Buy
Circe
by Madeline Miller
The most widely read contemporary feminist myth retelling — Circe, the witch-goddess of Greek mythology, narrating her own story from her island; the companion for Penelopiad readers who want a full-length novel in the same tradition of the feminist classical retelling.
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The Song of Achilles
by Madeline Miller
The companion Miller — the Trojan War from the perspective of Patroclus, Achilles's companion; shares The Penelopiad's interest in the human cost of the heroic world that Homer's poems celebrate.
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Wide Sargasso Sea
by Jean Rhys
The predecessor feminist literary retelling — Antoinette Cosway (Bertha Mason), the Creole first wife of Rochester in Jane Eyre, given her own story and her own voice; the most influential of all the twentieth-century novels that give the silenced women of canonical literature their own perspective.
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Madeline Miller's Galatea
by Madeline Miller
Miller's short retelling of the myth of Galatea — the statue Pygmalion sculpted and brought to life — giving her the anger and interiority the myth denies her; the shortest and most pointed of Miller's classical retellings, and a natural companion for The Penelopiad.
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Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls
by Pat Barker
The companion feminist Iliad retelling — Briseis, Achilles's slave, narrating the Trojan War from inside the Greek camp; the novel that most directly complements The Penelopiad by giving a voice to the enslaved women of Homer's epic world.
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A Thousand Ships
by Natalie Haynes
The companion multi-voiced feminist Trojan War novel — Haynes's retelling of the fall of Troy from the perspectives of the women on both sides; the most comprehensive feminist reimagining of the Homeric world that The Penelopiad takes as its subject.
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