Daughters of Troy

In the past few years there has been a flourishing of literary responses to the Trojan war. To mention a few: Barry Unsworth’s elegant The Songs of the Kings enhanced the narrative with psychological flair; Alice Oswald’s beautifully distilled Memorial brought a disquieting focus on to the deaths of lesser heroes, as well as the electric beauty of the Homeric similes drawn from the natural world; and last year’s The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker, which successfully imagined the Iliad with Agamemnon’s slave-girl as the narrator. Natalie Haynes, with A Thousand Ships, a retelling of the war and the stories around it, has entered a crowded field.

Haynes’s central premise is that heroism is vested as much in women as in men. When Menelaus loses Helen, he creates ‘countless widows, orphans and slaves’, whereas Oenone, the wife of Paris, ‘loses her husband and she raises their son. Which of those is the more heroic act?’ It’s a multi-faceted question, and myriad female voices are brought to bear in the attempt to answer it.