Lavinia

Ursula K. Le Guin's Lavinia is a quiet, lyrical late period novel that hands the microphone to one of the great silent women of Western literature. In Virgil's Aeneid, Lavinia is the Italian princess Aeneas marries in the second half of the poem, the cause of a war and the founding mother of the Roman people, and she does not speak a single line. Le Guin imagines Lavinia as a thoughtful young woman of the early Italian kingdom of Latium, the daughter of King Latinus, whose mother wants her to marry the Rutulian warrior Turnus and whose own quiet inclinations pull her toward the foreign refugee Aeneas. In a series of mystical encounters at the spring of Albunea, Lavinia speaks across time with the dying Virgil himself, who half apologizes for not giving her a voice and half explains that he did not have time. Le Guin writes in the calm, considered voice of her late work, treating fate, war, and matrimony as the ordinary weather of a woman's life.