For Women’s History Month this year, librarians at UVA recommend a variety of books written by women, ranging from science fiction to memoir to Greek myths.
Recommended by Erin Dickey, Research Librarian for the Arts
“I Who Have Never Known Men” by Jacqueline Harpman, translated by Ros Schwartz (Transit Books, 2022)
Jacqueline Harpman’s “I Who Have Never Known Men” asks what gives life meaning when all other signatures of meaning have been stripped away: history, relationships, motivation, freedom. It begins in an underground cell with 40 women and one adolescent girl, put there through mysterious circumstances, unable to leave or learn why they have been incarcerated, a situation of total control and total surveillance by male guards who never speak to them. Told from the perspective of the girl, the speculative novel follows her awakening to thought and to companionship, her adaptation to her condition and surroundings, her insistence on her own agency. Daydreaming causes her to think, which makes her question the “why” of their existence in the cell. Questioning leads her to practice subtle forms of resistance against the guards and develop tactics for survival. They eventually escape their cell, but the world above has little more to offer them. Yet the girl, now a woman, continues to think and to explore, her story the progenitor of readers’ reflections on gender, power, and purpose. Compact and devastating, this is a book that sticks.
“The Female Man” by Joanna Russ (Bantam, 1975)
In addition to being a feminist utopian science fiction novel that uses multiverse theory to explain time travel, Joanna Russ’ “The Female Man” is also a meditation on the social construction of gender. Published in 1975, it is a time capsule of the progressive gender politics of the early 1970s and is, therefore, both prescient and imperfect. Following the adventures of Joanna, Jael, Jeannine, and Janet — a woman from a society where there are no men and haven't been for at least 900 years — the book is a conduit, like the best speculative fiction, for imagining alternate futures based on the oppositional political goals of the present. Some social facts from Janet’s fictional land of Whileaway (described as “in the future, but not our future”):
- Inhabitants receive a five-year sabbatical to have a baby at age 30: “Food, cleanliness, and shelter are not the mother’s business.”
- The work week is 16 hours.
- “‘How do the women of Whileaway do their hair?’ ‘They hack it off with clamshells.’”
“Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia Butler” by Susana M. Morris (Amistad, 2025)
In tracing the interior world of science fiction legend Octavia E. Butler through her writing, journals, archives, and interviews, Susana M. Morris generates a fascinating character study as well as a gripping story of struggle and persistence set against late-20th-century U.S. cultural history. True Butler-heads will thrill to the in-depth backstories of both her most famous and her lesser-known novels and stories. Morris dives deep into Butler’s process, describing how her reliance on habit, affirmations, and research sustained her through years of temp jobs and loneliness. Butler’s intricate observations of human behavioral patterns shift into even clearer focus through Morris’ detailed account of her experiences of classism, ableism, racism, and sexism — all while trying to launch a writing career as a Black feminist in Reagan’s America. Emerging from both the political backdrop of the 1980s and 1990s and the prism of her own experiences, Butler’s novels of this period, read now as prophetic, mark her as an eerily acute diagnostician of our era, even as they refuse to abandon the possibility of another way.
Recommended by Keith Weimer, Research Librarian for History and Religious Studies
“Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman” by Cathy Wilkerson (Seven Stories Press, 2001)
Women were notable leaders of the Weather Underground, one of the most prominent and violent radical groups of the late 1960s and early ’70s, but they sometimes subordinated women’s liberation to civil rights for African Americans and “Third World liberation.” As Wilkerson and other radicals became increasingly frustrated with U.S. complicity in injustice towards developing countries, they [mis]applied Third World liberation analysis to white college students, eventually participating in violence, including a spectacularly failed attempt to bomb an Army dance that would have been catastrophic for the American Left had it succeeded. The memoir also describes Wilkerson’s years underground, her eventual reintegration into society, and her ongoing activism. The memoir suggests that even in the 1950s, educational and leisure opportunities and her mother’s progressive inclinations encouraged a sense that Wilkerson could be an agent for change.
Recommended by Leigh Rockey, Librarian for Collections Management and Video Resources
Over the past ten years or so, new writings of Greek myths by contemporary women have become popular. Many of the works refocus the storylines of myths on women or reinterpret myths through the voices of female characters. Please consult the list below for some recommendations of these retellings, as well as a few non-fiction works addressing the trend.
“Circe” by Madeline Miller (Little, Brown and Company, 2018)
If you need a gateway drug into the modern-women-writing-Greek-myth craze, then start here. This novel is what we call a page-turner, and yet it manages to sustain the rational tone we associate with Greek myths. With Circe herself narrating, we come to see her actions as those of a reasonable lone woman protecting her space and making the most of her exile. She turns sailors into swine, yes, but only after they behave like pigs.
“Hera” by Jennifer Saint (Flatiron Books, 2024)
Some reviewers have called this book a feminist vindication of Hera, but it’s actually a revealing representation of a powerful but flawed character who never overcame her resentment of Zeus’ self-positioning as the king of the gods. She was born and raised to rule with her brother Zeus, and she was crucial to the overthrow of the Titans, but somehow she became Zeus’ wife, a degraded and twisted version of herself, more like a queen consort than a ruler. Will she always be the goddess of marriage, a construct she loathes? Can she never convert her horror into Hera-ism?
“Pandora’s Jar: Women in Greek Myths” by Natalie Haynes (Picador, 2020)
Reacquaint yourself with the origins and many interpretations of the women of Greek myths by using this book as a primer of sorts. Natalie Haynes encapsulates extensive research within brief, often hilarious, essays explaining how mythical women like Jocasta, Clytemnestra, and Medusa show up across the centuries in Sophocles and Marlowe, as well as Star Trek and Internet memes. She also investigates why the women of myth are so often the villain of the story.
“Penelope’s Bones: A New History of Homer’s World through the Women Written Out of It” by Emily Hauser (University of Chicago Press, 2025)
Emily Hauser uses archeological and scientific evidence of the lives of real women in Bronze Age Greece and Turkey to flesh out the female characters of “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey.” For example, she looks at Chryseis, Agamemnon’s lost prize, through discoveries about family life from the excavations of a house at Akrotiri on the island of Thera (Santorini). Murals inside the buildings of the revealed site show how a privileged daughter of the time might have grown up, picking crocuses from the fields and applying saffron to a ritual incense burner. While these scenes are idealized, they do offer insight into the background of the daughter of Chryses — she is speechless in “The Iliad,” so we must find out about her in some other way.
“The Silence of the Girls” by Pat Barker (Doubleday, 2018)
When we think of the story of “The Iliad,” we think of a doomed city and the warriors who clashed for years in the shadows of its walls. We might also think of Helen, whose beauty purportedly incited such destruction, or Penelope, weaving and waiting at home for her husband Odysseus. We rarely concern ourselves with the Trojan women stolen from their homes and forced into being slaves who served the Greek army. Pat Barker rectifies our omission by concentrating on the fascinating stories of Briseis and her sister captives. The book is a behind-the-scenes revelation of both terror and mundane existence. Its riveting reappraisal of “The Iliad” not only positions Briseis as a heroine but also redefines mythic male characters like Achilles and Patroclus.
There are also many new translations by women of classical texts, including the first published English translation of “The Odyssey” by a woman. Check these out:
- “The Odyssey” by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson (W. W. Norton, 2018)
- “The Iliad” by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson (W. W. Norton, 2023)
- “Metamorphoses” by Ovid, translated by Stephanie McCarte (Penguin, 2022)
- “How to Think About War: An Ancient Guide to Foreign Policy, from Speeches from the History of the Peloponnesian War” by Thucydides, translated by Johanna Hanink (Princeton University Press, 2019)