In the first of the Grecian Women Trilogy books, Athena’s Child, Hannah Lynn retells the story of Medusa and Perseus. In the second of the trilogy, A Spartan’s Sorrow, Lynn revisits the Trojan War, focusing on Clytemnestra. As in her depiction of Medusa, Lynn again handles the persistence of the male hierarchy and how women, even other women, blame the victim for her plight rather than blaming the perpetrator.
Clytemnestra, the wife of Agamemnon and the sister of Helen of Troy, remains at home, governing their kingdom well, while he goes off to fight the Trojan War. Lynn gives us a strong, complex woman with fierce maternal instincts, brought about by Agamemnon’s murder of her beloved first husband and her first son. Her protective, perhaps overly-protective, instincts determine her future.
The prose here is less simplistic than in the prior Athena’s Child, but still far less poetic that that in Madeline Miller’s Circe or Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls. Lynn does ask us to listen to the stories of women that the patriarchy sees as villains and to reevaluate their lives in view of the #MeToo movement. However, as in Athena’s Child, Lynn ends in the male point of view, as she follows the life of Clytemnestra’s son, Orestes, thus diluting her efforts at feminism. Because A Spartan’s Sorrow runs fifty pages beyond the length of Athena’s Child, Lynn has more room to focus on characterization, thus Clytemnestra is more fully realized, and the rest of the cast is better developed as well.
********************
A Spartan’s Sorrow is available through Amazon.
********************
This post contains Amazon Affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, I earn a small amount from qualifying purchases.
