Book description
In
Homer's Daughter
Robert Graves recreates the Odyssey
. This bold retelling of the ancient epic imagines that its author was
not the blind and bearded Homer of legend, but a young woman in Western
Sicily who calls herself Nausica . In Robert Graves's words, Homer's Daughter
is 'the story of a high-spirited and religious-minded Sicilian girl who
saves her father's throne from usurpation, herself from a distasteful
marriage, and her two younger brothers from butchery by boldly making
things happen, instead of sitting still and hoping for the best.'
Robert Graves was a poet, professor, and the author of Goodbye to All That
(1929), a landmark anti-heroic memoir of life in the trenches during
World War I. He is even better known for his historical novels about the
Roman emperor Claudius: I, Claudius
(1934) and Claudius the God
(1935). Despite those successes, Graves was primarily a poet: he
published dozens of volumes of his verse during his life, and was
professor of poetry at Oxford from 1961-66. Graves lived most of his
adult life on the island of Majorca, at first with fellow poet Laura
Riding, and later with his second wife Beryl Hodge.
