Finding Lost Voices: A Conversation with Emily Hauser about her book, Penelope's Bones

A weekly email that brings back the voices of those who have been forgotten or misremembered

Finding Lost Voices took a short two-week hiatus, but we’re back!

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A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to sit down with Dr. Emily Hauser, a classicist and creative writer whose newest book, Penelope’s Bones, explores the erasure of women from classical culture and texts. In each chapter, Hauser weaves together literary and archaeological evidence to illuminate the lives of the real women behind Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.

In 2018, Emily Wilson made headlines as the first woman to publish an English translation of The Odyssey—a fact that still feels astonishing. (To read my interview with Emily Wilson on Finding Lost Voices, visit this past post.) Her translation not only offered a more inclusive perspective on The Odyssey, but it also began to bring to light the hidden histories of women. As Emily Hauser writes in the introduction to Penelope’s Bones:

“...women who have studied and continue to trailblaze the study of Homer—the women classicists, historians, scientists, translators, archaeologists—who have contributed so much to our knowledge about the past.”

In Penelope’s Bones, Hauser doesn't limit her focus to Homer’s most famous female characters—Penelope and Helen of Troy. She also offers insight into:

“...the pioneering women intellectuals—their names often lost to the record, or not recognized as they should be—who have dedicated their lives to uncovering the lost worlds of Bronze Age Greece, and of Homer.”

Below is our conversation where we cover everything from Challenging Archival Violence and Whitewashed Narratives, and Gender Fluidity in the Ancient World to Feminist and Inclusive Approaches to Classics.

Iris Dunkle:
I’d love to start by hearing what inspired you to write this book?

Emily Hauser:
It really began as a long love story with Homer, but also as a response to a question—a kind of provocation. For me, it started with the Iliad. I feel like Homerists always have a favorite: the Iliad or the Odyssey. Mine was always the Iliad.

What really provoked me was how the Odyssey is often framed as more open, more diverse, and more present with women. Whereas the Iliad is typically described as monolithic and masculine: all about men, battles, gore, not particularly interesting to women. But when I read the Iliad, I didn’t see that. Yes, there are endless battle scenes, but the women aren't incidental. They’re not just there to break the tension—they’re integral.

You can’t have war without peace, or husbands without wives. The war itself wouldn’t have started or ended without women. And the heroes wouldn’t have even recognized home without Penelope. That tension led me to what I’ve come to call the Homeric paradox: on the surface, women are marginalized in the epics, but they play vital, often subversive, roles that challenge the male narrative. That’s particularly evident in the Odyssey, with figures like Calypso and Circe.

My first response to this paradox was through fiction. I began writing novels that revoice silenced women, such as Briseis and Chryseis. Fiction, I believe, has a unique power to reclaim voices, alongside history and scholarship. But I also asked: what could I contribute from a scholarly perspective? I was fortunate to study Greek, so I turned to close textual analysis to explore how language shaped cultural ideas, especially around women's roles.

That led to my academic monograph, How Women Became Poets: A Gender History of Greek Literature, which began with a simple but telling question: Why did Sappho-the, the first known female poet, have no word for herself? In ancient Greek, the word for “poet” was grammatically and culturally masculine. A feminine version didn’t exist until centuries later. So, how do we tell that story through language? (If you are interested in this topic, discuss Hauser’s earlier book, How Women Became Poets: A Gender History of Greek Literature in this past Finding Lost Voices post.)

This current project brings together both those approaches—fiction and scholarship. Each chapter opens with a fictional vignette, and I also use storytelling techniques—like staging archaeological discoveries—to reimagine the lives of ancient women. It’s about blending cultural and linguistic context with imagination to foreground women in a historically grounded way.

Iris Dunkle:
I love that approach. And I was so glad to see you reference Saidiya Hartman and her idea that when someone’s voice hasn’t been recorded, it’s okay, even necessary, to imagine it into being.

Emily Hauser:
Absolutely. Her work was a major inspiration.

Iris Dunkle:
I loved the way you structured yourproject. The narrative openings to each chapter really pulled me in. Dropping readers into a scene before shifting into analysis made everything come alive, and helped connect back to the lives and experiences of women.

Emily Hauser:
Thank you—that really means a lot. That structure reflects my own journey: trying to integrate my identities as both a creative writer and an academic. In English departments, those dual identities are often seen as complementary. But in classics, there really isn’t a model for that kind of integration. For a long time, I kept the two parts of myself separate. But eventually I wanted to prove that I could do both: speak the traditional academic language and write creatively. Not because one is better than the other, but because both are valuable and exciting in different ways.

Iris Dunkle:
And in doing that, you’re helping to shift the boundaries of what’s possible in classics. You’re opening space for others.

Emily Hauser:
That’s the hope. I also feel a responsibility to do this work from within academia—to show younger scholars, especially women, that it’s possible. That you can be a classicist and do this kind of work and still be taken seriously.

Iris Dunkle:
Are you able to bring this approach into your teaching?

Emily Hauser:
Yes, in two key ways. First, in the content I teach. I offer an undergraduate course that crosses archaeology, history, epic, and myth—already pushing against how classics traditionally defines itself. My department’s been very supportive of that.

Second, I incorporate creative assignments. English departments have long embraced that, but other fields are behind. I teach a course on how contemporary women writers are reimagining classical texts. We read modern novels by writers like Madeline Miller and Pat Barker. It’s not so different from English literature—except that in classics, that kind of work is still seen as outside the norm. At a certain point, we’re really pressing the limits of saying, “This is Classics.” So, what are we getting out of it? For students, one of the most powerful things is allowing them to do something creative. It gives them an internal insight—what it actually feels like to reshape a myth.

Iris Dunkle: That’s wonderful. Let’s return to some of the women you spotlight in the text. When I first approached your book, I assumed it would focus only on the named women—where they appear in the Odyssey, for instance, and their biographical details. But your approach is entirely different. With Calypso, for example, you weave history and material culture together.

Emily Hauser: Yes, Calypso is a great example. One of the fundamental problems with how we often approach women in Homer is that we do so through Homer—that is, through a male-authored, male-curated text written for a male audience over centuries.

So when we say, “Let’s look at Calypso in Homer,” what we’re really doing is looking at how women are portrayed in male literature. That’s interesting, but it doesn’t put women at the center of the narrative.

What I wanted to do was ask: how can we start from the women themselves, not from the stories men told about them? With Calypso, I chose to focus on one fragment of her experience—her weaving. I set aside the myth and the literary text and looked at the history and archaeology. What can we learn about the women who wove, who labored, who created sails that powered ships?

Once I did that work, the Odyssey read differently. We realize Odysseus’s seven-year stay with Calypso isn’t just about his delay—it’s also about her captivity through labor. The hours and years it took to produce textiles, especially a sail, are mind-blowing. That labor becomes the context for his departure. It’s a rhetoric we wouldn’t have arrived at if we started with the text alone.

Iris Dunkle: That’s brilliant. Even the way you introduce color—how statues were originally painted—was revelatory. I remember the moment I learned that Greek statues weren’t made of white marble, but were vividly painted.

Emily Hauser: Exactly! That’s one of many widespread misconceptions. And it ties directly into women’s stories. The narrative of white marble feeds into larger myths of purity, simplicity, and perfection—ideas that have been misappropriated for modern agendas.

Part of the meta-narrative of the book is to challenge both ancient and modern assumptions. When we reorient history to begin with women, we discover the ancient world may have been less the problem than how it’s been interpreted and used today.

Iris Dunkle: Could you talk about one of the women from the Iliad section of the book?

Emily Hauser: Yes! One I loved writing about—partly for personal reasons—was the story of "the most beautiful." She’s the one who really started this whole journey for me. I knew her story inside and out: her place in the Iliad, the historical background.

But what surprised me was how her story also revealed the marginalization of women scholars. I had always been taught about Michael Ventris—the wunderkind who solved Linear B and died tragically young. What I didn’t know was that a woman, Alice Kober, laid the groundwork that made his deciphering possible.

Her most significant insight was recognizing that the language had grammatical gender—a key feature of ancient Greek. Ventris had missed that. Without Kober’s work, the thousands of women named in those tablets would’ve remained invisible. And then, Kober herself was erased. That layering—women recovering women, and then being forgotten—is central to the work I’m doing.

Iris Dunkle: That aspect of your work is so powerful—recovering not just ancient women, but also the women who brought their stories back. It reminds me of Virginia Woolf’s “Shakespeare’s sister,” but even that metaphor feels limited now. The truth is, women were doing the work all along—they were just erased.

Emily Hauser: Absolutely. And that’s why I think it’s so important to research all fields from multiple points of view. Just as Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey gave voice to characters who were previously backgrounded—enslaved women, the palace women who were slaughtered—we can see how perspective radically shifts meaning.

And I want to be clear: this is not just a history of women. It’s part of a bigger puzzle of inclusive history. You can’t do everything, but you can open the door to telling these lost tales. That’s also why I used Emily Wilson’s translations throughout the book—to show how women are making strides across many disciplines.

Yes, it’s shocking that the first female translation of the Odyssey was published in 2017. But it’s also happening. We’re here. We’re doing the work.

Iris Dunkle: I really appreciated your section on Athena and gender fluidity. The Griffin Warrior example stood out to me—how you wove trans perspectives into that narrative.

Emily Hauser: Thank you. That was important to me. In this project of inclusivity, it was crucial to show that I wasn’t closing anything down—but opening up our understanding of gender across time.

The Griffin Warrior’s grave, discovered in 2014, had goods typically coded as both masculine and feminine. To reduce that to “a male burial” misses the complexity of how gender was expressed.

And if we look at Athena—when she takes on the bodies of men like Mentor or Mentes in the Odyssey—we often explain it away because she’s a god. But gender fluidity existed in the ancient world, both in myth and among mortals. It’s just that only now do we have the interpretive frameworks to recognize it.

Iris Dunkle: History repeats itself, after all. Which is why we need to double down on correcting what Jacques Derrida called, archival violence in his book, Archive Fever. In Classics, this has been a centuries-long issue.

Emily Hauser: I completely agree. And the easy response to that kind of archival violence would be to push back equally hard. But I really tried with this book not to do that. I’m not saying we should discard Homer or the Iliad and Odyssey because they’re androcentric. Rather, I want to find new ways of relating to them—ways that include lost voices alongside those that were preserved. It’s careful work, but crucial.

Iris Dunkle: That makes perfect sense. Two final questions. First: can someone without a strong background in Classics approach your book?

Emily Hauser: Yes! I wrote it so that no prior knowledge is needed. I explain the plotlines of the Iliad and Odyssey as I go, weaving them into each chapter. Each one begins with an archaeological artifact, then focuses on a character from Homer. Over time, readers get a full narrative arc of the poems, but told through the lens of the women.

Ideally, even someone who hasn’t read the epics could come away with an understanding and perhaps be inspired to pick up Emily Wilson’s translations.

Iris Dunkle: I love that. And finally, where do you see the field of Classics scholarship going?

Emily Hauser: I’ll give you both my optimistic and cynical takes. Optimistically, there are so many new avenues opening—reexamining the past through race, gender, class, and the stories of marginalized people. There’s tremendous potential.

But I’m also wary of a widening divide: those in academia who support this inclusive work, and those who want to ring-fence Classics, preserve a narrow tradition, and turn back the clock.

My hope is that we continue moving toward a reparative, inclusive approach—one that still engages with the difficult parts of our texts, not to erase them but to expand the conversation.

For More Information

• To read Emily Hauser’s book Penelope’s Bones, visit https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo250606968.html

• To read, Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey and the Iliad visit her website.

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July 2025

July 20-25 - The Napa Valley Writers Conference in Napa, CA - for a full schedule visit: https://www.napawritersconference.org/napa-valley-writers-conference/2025-readings-craft-talks-schedule/

July 26, 1:00 PM - Poetry in Parks with Ada Limon, Nicole Callihan, Forrest Gander and Iris Jamahl Dunkle, Armstrong Redwoods Forest Theater, 17000 Armstrong Woods Rd, Guerneville, CA 95446.
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September 20 - Iris Jamahl Dunkle in conversation with Holly Baggett, author of Making No Compromise at the Kansas Book Festival.

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