In this spellbinding new collection, Charlotte Higgins reinterprets some of the most enduring stories of all time. Higgins’s own volume is illustrated by the Turner prize-winning Chris Ofili, whose drawings are charming and airy, suggestive in spirit of Matisse’s pencil sketches. While they undoubtedly beautify an already alluring object, the deeper Higgins leads the reader into her forest of tales, the less necessary they feel. Full of rage and self-loathing, Medusa grows ravenous for connection, ‘a girl on the edge’

But where does mythology come from? Did the Greeks believe their myths? If myth hovers at the boundary of truth and untruth, what can it tell us about ourselves? Here are myths of the creation, of Heracles and Theseus and Perseus, the Trojan War and its origins and aftermaths, tales of Thebes and Argos and Athens, stories of love and desire, adventure and magic, destructive gods, helpless humans, fantastical creatures, resourceful witches and the origins of birds and animals. Unlike in many previous collected myths, female characters take centre-stage – Athena, Helen, Circe, Penelope and others weave these stories into elaborate imagined tapestries. In Charlotte Higgins’ thrilling new interpretation, their tales combine to form a dazzling, sweeping epic of storytelling, and a magnificent work of scholarship and imagination. What I did expect from this book was a slightly more academic retelling of the myths and I did expect there to be a more feminist perspective on the stories, especially when you look at the table of contents and the chapters are all named after women in the mythology. This was just not it. Like women being called vessels/incubators in a female focus feminist retelling? Bold Choice. I don't understand why this part was included. Women do all the work for 9 months, then risk dying in birth, yet guys get all the credit for 10 seconds of "work" while in bliss. The trial wasn't even needed, you could've just left it at the murder as a lot of the stories get no closure. So I don't get why this part was even included. Looking down from Olympus, Aphrodite smiled to herself, then shrugged, and started to comb out her long, shining hair."Inspired by the ancient world’s favourite literary technique of ekphrasis – not only describing a static tableau but telling a story that moves through time via a description of an artwork – she uses the personae of her weavers to add psychological depth, emotional clout and sometimes philosophical profundity to dozens of embedded narratives. Weaving was a metaphor at the heart of ancient metaphysics, since the Fates measure out and cut off the threads of human life itself. Arachne, the victim of Athena’s pride and self-love, depicts stories of gods committing injustices against humans; Philomela, raped and mutilated by her own brother-in-law, weaves tales of individuals damaged by sexual desire. We never get a deeper look into their minds and motivations. It felt like I was watching a play through a dirty window in a soundproof room. It is true that murdering a parent is a terrible thing,’ replied Apollo. ‘But understand this: the crime under consideration is not the murder of a parent. The mother is not the parent of a child. It is the father who is the only true parent. Look at it this way: it is the father’s seed that enters the womb. The womb is only the soil that the plant grows in. The woman is just … the vessel for the child. We know this because the womb is not even needed! Here is the proof, standing before you: Athena. Zeus gave birth to her himself – no need for a mother. She was born from his head.’ If you want a feminist (revisionist) retelling where the main female protagonist is actually interesting and/ or gets a redemption arc, THIS IS REALLY NOT THAT BOOK. You should try Katee Robert or Scarlett St. Clair (and if you don’t like smex try Alexandra Braken or if you’re literally a child try Mary Pope Osborn). And if you want the individual voices of the women in Greek myths to linger in your soul for every single day until you die, read Nina MacLaughlin or Nakita Gill. The vast portions of their lives women spent weaving are ubiquitously reflected in ancient mythology. Occasionally, we hear what pictures they created – Helen at Troy weaves scenes from the very war she is said to have caused – but more often we do not. Higgins describes how, when Penelope must finally complete the shroud for her father-in-law, Laertes – a fabric with “a design as intricate as her own involved, withheld mind” – she folds it up and puts it away. The design we want to hear described is left cleverly untold. It will “remain a secret, now, between her and Laertes’ corpse”.

SS: Thank you so much, Charlotte. I think one of the many reasons Ovid’s work feels so timeless is that we all love to see the inexplicable world explained to us, at least partially. Your Greek Myths does this beautifully, too, giving us (just to name a few!) the stories of how the world was born, how humans (with Prometheus’s help) evolved, and how The Furies, with their loyalty to mothers, become Kindly Ones whose power transferred to cities. The deep level of reader satisfaction those answers create are what I hoped to achieve with the Origin stories in my own novel, scenes that show how the family wound up in such fraught circumstances. I think one of the many reasons Ovid’s work feels so timeless is that we all love to see the inexplicable world explained to us, at least partially. I especially loved the portrayal of Medea (my favourite, guys she has dragons AND magic) and Helen, who is given a far more sympathetic treatment than most other versions. as a pacifist (okay, and a hippie) I find the Trojan War really exasperating (that woman has a lover! let's go kill a ton of people over it, even though she's happy now!), and Helen's perspective was quite touching. her story is told partially through Andromache's tapestry and partly through her own. Andromache is Hector's wife, and no, I didn't know who she was either. But Priam--and his eldest son, Hector, Paris's brother--knew that Helen was a pretext. There was always an excuse for war, some symbol or stand-in. It was often a woman; this time it was Helen. What the Greeks really wanted, all along, was Troy's wealth They wanted the treasuries of her temples emptied out, her women lined up and shared out-soft bodies on which to vent their rage and greed." Other chapters also incorporate The Odyssey, The Homeric Hymns, Euripides, Sophocles, etc, but these are all interwoven and retold amazingly. This idea is rooted in a recurring motif in classical literature: the idea of telling stories through descriptions of spectacular artworks, a literary convention known as ekphrasis. The first and most famous ekphrasis is the description of the scenes decorating the shield of Achilles, in the Iliad. Much later, in the first century BC, the entire story of Theseus, Ariadne and the Minotaur was told by the Roman poet Catullus through a long description of the designs woven into a bedspread. A feature of ekphrasis was that the item under description could, at times, take on its own life as a narrative, escaping the status of an imagined object. Specifically, though, the idea is inspired by the occasions in classical literature when female characters take control of a story.This is supposed to be a ~feminist retelling~ but that is only true because 1) each chapter title is the name of a woman and 2) the author is literally just TELLING you the same Greek stories over again. Higgins does this without giving any woman vitality, voice, agency, or any quality that makes them less blurry than any ubiquitous story with a woman in it. Reading this book was a mf CHORE.

What we think of as “the Greek myths” are the stories we find in the poetry, plays and prose of the ancient Greeks and Romans – a world also animated by an extraordinary surviving visual culture including ceramics, sculpture and frescoes. These myths deal with a long-lost past in which the worlds of immortals and humans overlap, and in which some exceptional humans can become almost divine. It is from this vast, contradictory, extraordinarily variegated body of literature that the tales in my new book are taken. By enrolling on this masterclass, you’re helping to support the Guardian, and this allows us to keep our quality reporting open to all. What is relatively new is the way in which female mythological characters are now being placed at the centre of narratives in which they’ve traditionally been peripheral. Taking her lead from the likes of Pat Barker and Madeline Miller, Higgins’s Greek Myths: A New Retelling is narrated by female characters. Or rather, it’s woven by female characters, because to give voice to this very 21st-century impulse, she uses a classical literary convention known as ekphrasis, or the telling of tales through descriptions of striking works of art – in this case, tapestries. A complication for the reader (and reteller) is that the heros of ancient Greek literature was not at all the kind of person meant when the word “hero” is used in modern English – the self-sacrificing military man whom Hawthorne might have had in mind, or the frontline healthcare worker we might think of today. The heros of Greek literature was an extreme and disturbing figure, closely connected to the gods. Achilles is by modern standards a war criminal who violates his enemy’s corpse; Heracles murders his own wife and children; Theseus is a rapist.

My book reasserts the connectedness of all this: text and textile, the universe, the production of ideas, the telling of stories, and the delicate filaments of human life. These are the lives that are so cunningly and ruthlessly manipulated by the Fates, the all powerful ancient goddesses who spin, wind and finally cut the thread of each person’s existence.