By This year, Hearst launched its first ever Big Book Awards scheme, and ELLE was given the category of Women Writers to judge. Thousands of pages, hundreds of characters and nine eye-catching book covers later, we’re thrilled to announce that the winner, chosen by ELLE editors and you, the readers, is Circe by Madeline Miller.
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Even if you don’t know your Athena from your Aphrodite, Circe manages to be a compelling novel for every reader. It tells the story of Homer’s The Odyssey from the point of view of Circe, the first witch in literature, infamous for turning Odysseus’s men into pigs. Here, she gets to tell her own story as a protagonist – not as a side note. As ELLE’s editor-in-chief, Anne-Marie Curtis, one of the Big Book judges, puts it: ‘I never thought I’d describe a book as a feminist romp through Greek mythology, but this is it! Madeline Miller recasts Circe’s witchery in a whole new, empowering light, and the result is a riveting tale for today’s times.’
We spoke to Miller about reinventing a mythical character and why Circe’s story compelling, energising feminist story helps us understand the unequal world we are still living in.
YOU PREVIOUSLY RETOLD A CLASSICAL MYTH IN THE NOVEL THE SONG OF ACHILLES. WHERE DID THE IDEA FOR CIRCE COME FROM?
Circe was actually a character that I had been interested in since I was about 13 years old and I read The Odyssey for the first time. And what really grabbed me when I was 13 and what has stuck with me was I was fascinated by the mystery of the character. Homer doesn’t tell us why she’s turning men to pigs, or how she got this power, how she came to this island.
I can’t write a novel unless I’m completely obsessed with the story and the character, so when I finished Song of Achilles, Circe was just there, it was as if she’d been waiting for years and years for me to finally finish Song of Achilles and have time for her. I wanted to give her the chance to tell her story.
In the Odyssey, we first see her and she’s very powerful, and then Odysseus threatens her with his sword and she gets on her knees and begs for mercy, and it’s such a quick switch from this powerful woman to the woman’s power having to be put in its place literally on her knees. And I was so frustrated by the fact that, because this is the hero’s story, Odysseus’s story, she has to kind of get out of the way for him, and so I wanted to tell the story where she is the hero, and he has to get out of her way.
SHOULD CIRCE BE READ AS A STORY OF FEMALE STRENGTH?
At the core this is the story of a person who is born into a constricting, restrictive, repressive society, who wants to try and take her destiny into her own hands. And she has to fight to do that, and nobody gives her an easy path for having power, so she has to find her own way to power, and there are lots of pitfalls along the way. This is a world where power is abused a lot, and I think Circe is trying to figure out: is it possible to have power to control your own destiny but not to turn around and then abuse others with that power?
A lot of the ways that Circe has to struggle have to do with her being repressed because she’s a woman. But I also wanted it to be a very universal story, that both men and women, young and old, can identify with – which is trying to find your place in the world, trying to discover who you are, away from how your family wants you to be and how the world says you have to be. And how you can walk your own path. You could say, in terms of gender, our society is not really that different from the one depicted by Homer.
WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THE BOOK’S RELEASE IN A POST- #METOO WORLD?
This conversation has been a long time coming, maybe 3,OOO years, and I’m really glad it’s finally starting to happen. Circe in the ancient world is pretty much the incarnation of male anxiety about female power: the idea that if a woman has power, then men must be suffering. That conversation is still with us, and that’s scary. Hopefully Circe can show that, unfortunately, this is a timeless conversation, and although we have come a long way, we still have far to go.
WHICH WOMEN WRITERS HAVE YOU BEEN INSPIRED BY?
Margaret Atwood’s work was a revelation to me when I was a teen; I loved Jeanette Winterson, Sylvia Plath, George Eliot and Jane Austen, although I’m not sure Austen has influenced the way I write!
This is a condensed version of the conversation.
