The Penelopiad

The Penelopiad Review

The Penelopiad is Margaret Atwood’s entry in the Canongate Myths series — a project in which contemporary authors were invited to retell ancient myths — and it is the most focused and formally inventive of her shorter works of fiction. The novella gives Penelope a voice from the afterlife, allowing Homer’s most famously patient and virtuous woman to offer her own account of the twenty years she spent waiting for Odysseus, the suitors she managed, and the version of events that the epic has always offered.

Atwood’s Penelope is wry, intelligent, and fully aware of her own position in the story — she knows she has been cast as the good wife against whom Helen’s bad wife is measured, and she is not entirely comfortable with the role. Her account of her marriage is affectionate but unsentimental; she respected Odysseus’s intelligence and knew very well that his self-regard exceeded his other qualities.

The formal breakthrough is the maids’ chorus. The twelve handmaids who were hanged on Odysseus’s return — presumably because they had slept with the suitors, though Atwood’s Penelope suggests more complicated possibilities — interrupt Penelope’s narrative in choral interjections that take various forms: ballad, lecture, drama, court transcript. Their presence transforms the novella from a simple recounting into a genuine structural argument: the heroic narrative has always suppressed the voices of the people who suffered for its heroes’ glory, and the maids are the Odyssey’s most conspicuous suppressed voice.

The question Atwood raises — whether Penelope knew that the maids would be killed, and whether she used them as tools — is left deliberately open. That ambiguity is the novella’s final irony.

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set The Penelopiad apart: The maids’ choral sections are formally inventive and genuinely affecting; Atwood’s Penelope is wry, self-aware, and deeply intelligent without being anachronistically modern; and The feminist critique emerges from the story’s logic rather than being imposed on it. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Themes

The thematic concerns of The Penelopiad give it weight beyond its surface narrative. Canonical narratives preserve the perspectives of the powerful — what we call ‘the story’ is always someone’s story at someone else’s expense. Penelope’s fidelity was not simple virtue but a complex strategy for survival in conditions she did not choose. The twelve hanged maids are the Odyssey’s unacknowledged victims — their punishment disproportionate to any offense they may have committed. These ideas emerge from the texture of the work rather than explicit statement, which is the mark of ambitious fiction done well.

The Writing

Margaret Atwood’s prose in The Penelopiad is the vehicle through which the book’s ideas travel. The style is calibrated to the subject — neither more ornate nor more stripped-down than the material requires. This kind of precision is less common than it appears, and it is one of the reasons the book repays re-reading: there is more in each page than a single pass recovers.

Limitations

At 199 pages, the treatment is necessarily compressed — some threads could have been developed further. Readers coming for narrative action may find the retrospective structure frustrating. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

The Canongate Myths Series

The Penelopiad was published in 2005 as part of the Canongate Myths series — a publishing project in which writers from around the world retold classical myths from new perspectives. Atwood’s contribution retells The Odyssey from the perspective of Penelope, who waited twenty years for Odysseus to return from Troy while suitors occupied her house, and of the twelve maids whom Odysseus hanged on his return. The novel is short — 197 pages — and operates partly as literary criticism of Homer: it identifies the gaps and contradictions in the original text (why are the twelve maids hanged without explanation? what did Penelope actually know about her suitors?) and reads them as evidence of a suppressed female perspective.

The Stage Adaptations

The Penelopiad has been adapted for the stage multiple times. The Royal Shakespeare Company premiered a theatrical version in 2007, and the work has been performed by numerous other companies internationally. Its dual form — Penelope’s prose narrative interrupted by the twelve maids performing as a Greek chorus in rhyme and song — lends itself naturally to theatrical presentation: the chorus sections are designed to be performed, and the contrast between Penelope’s controlled retrospective irony and the maids’ collective grief creates a tonal range that stage productions have used to considerable effect. The novel belongs to a tradition of feminist classical revisionism — alongside works by H.D., Anne Carson, and later Madeline Miller — that has become one of the more productive areas of contemporary literary fiction.

Canongate Myths Series

The Penelopiad was published in 2005 as part of the Canongate Myths series, in which prominent writers were commissioned to retell classical myths. Atwood’s choice of Penelope as narrator — giving the Odyssey’s waiting woman her own account to set against Odysseus’s — established the series’ model of feminist retellings. The twelve hanged maids, whose brief deaths in the Odyssey are treated as a routine punishment, become in Atwood’s version the novel’s most politically charged element: their choral interventions repeatedly interrupt the narrative to demand acknowledgment.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 3.9/5 — Atwood’s most focused mythological retelling — the maids’ choral interjections give the novella a theatrical quality that amplifies the central irony: Penelope’s loyalty was rewarded with the deaths of the women who served her.