The Penelopiad
From a hazy Greek afterlife where the gods rarely visit and the dead drift through asphodel, Penelope finally gets to tell her own version of the Odyssey. She begins with her childhood marriage to a strange short man named Odysseus, the long absence in which she ran Ithaca and held off a hundred suitors with a loom and a shroud, and the homecoming that ended in slaughter. Between her chapters speaks a chorus of the twelve maids that Odysseus and Telemachus hanged in a row from a single rope on the morning after his return: the women's account of who they were, why they slept with whom they did, and what they thought of their queen. Margaret Atwood's 2005 contribution to the Canongate Myth Series is a brief, sharp retelling of one of Western literature's foundational poems from inside the laundry, asking exactly what Homer chose to leave out.
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From the asphodel fields of the Greek underworld, Penelope looks back on her childhood in Sparta, her marriage to Odysseus, the twenty years of holding off suitors on Ithaca, and the morning he came home and hanged her twelve youngest maids. A chorus of those maids interrupts each chapter.
Yes. The Penelopiad is Margaret Atwood's 2005 retelling of The Odyssey from Penelope's perspective, with the chorus of the 12 hanged maids as a Greek-tragedy-style commentary. It was part of the Canongate Myth Series.
Yes. Margaret Atwood adapted The Penelopiad into a stage play that premiered at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2007.
The Penelopiad was written by Margaret Atwood, published in 2005 by Faber & Faber, Limited.
The Penelopiad is 191 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Penelopiad takes most readers 3 to 4 hours to finish.
The Penelopiad is a standalone novel by Margaret Atwood, not part of a series.
The Penelopiad is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
