From Circe to Medusa via Persephone, Electra and the women of Troy, it seems there are few characters from Greek mythology left who haven’t been the subject of a feminist retelling in recent years. This year, the world of such reimaginings is expanding beyond the Greeks – although there is a clutch of those retellings, too – with the publication of books about Julia from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (Katherine Bradley’s The Sisterhood), Rosaline from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (Fair Rosaline by Natasha Solomons) and Morgan le Fay from Arthurian legend (Sophie Keetch’s Morgan Is My Name).
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Looking at the number of books still to come – from Bea Fitzgerald’s Girl, Goddess, Queen to Jennifer Saint’s Atalanta – and those that have been released in the last couple of years, it seems there’s no end to these retellings. But are we close to reaching saturation point? And if a story is simply being retold, is there any creativity involved?
