AND the WINNER is...
THIS YEAR, HEARST LAUNCHED its first ever Big Book Awards scheme, and ELLE was given the category of Women Writers to judge. Thousands of pages, hundreds of characters and nine eye-catching book covers later, we’re thrilled to announce that the winner, chosen by ELLE editors and you, the readers, is Circe by Madeline Miller.
Even if you don’t know your Athena from your Aphrodite, Circe manages to be a compelling novel for every reader. It tells the story of Homer’s The Odyssey from the point of view of Circe, the first witch in literature, infamous for turning Odysseus’s men into pigs. Here, she gets to tell her own story as a protagonist – not as a side note. As ELLE’s editor-in-chief, Anne-Marie Curtis, one of the Big Book judges, puts it: ‘I never thought I’d describe a book as a feminist romp through Greek mythology, but this is it! Madeline Miller recasts Circe’s witchery in a whole new, empowering light, and the result is a riveting tale for today’s times.’
We spoke to Miller about reinventing a mythical character and why Circe’s story is more relevant today than ever.
YOU PREVIOUSLY RETOLD A CLASSICAL
MYTH IN THE NOVEL THE SONG OF ACHILLES. WHERE DID THE IDEA FOR
CIRCE COME FROM? Circe was a character I had been interested in since I was 13 years old, when I read The Odyssey for the first time. I was fascinated by the mystery of the character: Homer doesn’t tell us why Circe is turning men to pigs, or how she got this power. I can’t write a novel unless I’m completely obsessed with the story and the character, so when I finished The Song of
Achilles, Circe was just there; it was as if she’d been waiting for years and years for me.
SHOULD CIRCE BE READ AS A STORY OF FEMALE STRENGTH?
A lot of the ways that Circe has to struggle have to do with her being repressed because she’s a woman. But I also wanted it to be a very universal story, that both men and women, young and old, can identify with – which is trying to find your place in the world, trying to discover who you are, away from how your family wants you to be and how the world says you have to be. And how you can walk your own path. You could say, in terms of gender, our society is not really that different from the one depicted by Homer.
WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THE BOOK’S RELEASE IN A POST#METOO WORLD?
This conversation has been a long time coming, maybe 3,OOO years, and I’m really glad it’s finally starting to happen. Circe in the ancient world is pretty much the incarnation of male anxiety about female power: the idea that if a woman has power, then men must be suffering. That conversation is still with us, and that’s scary. Hopefully Circe can show that, unfortunately, this is a timeless conversation, and although we have come a long way, we still have far to go.
WHICH WOMEN WRITERS HAVE YOU BEEN INSPIRED BY?
Margaret Atwood’s work was a revelation to me when I was a teen; I loved Jeanette Winterson, Sylvia Plath, George Eliot and Jane Austen, although I’m not sure Austen has influenced the way I write!