Hauser's ambitious assessment of the women in Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey weaves together contemporary archeological findings with an insightful reading of the hidden depths of female figures who are more often silent and spoken for in the sagas. By attending to each portrayal in turn--from the well-known Helen to the recently recuperated Briseis, alongside Cassandra, Athena, Penelope, and a host of others--Hauser argues that we are in a position to better understand the status of women in the ancient world. This includes, tragically, their vulnerability to enslavement and, effectively, trafficking between men, and Hauser looks at how sexual violence is both intimated and explicitly revealed in the Homeric poems.

This is a book that both specialists and non-specialists will find appealing, because Hauser's prose style is accessible but her research is impeccable. This is feminist analysis, not revisionism, and it contributes a scholarly perspective to the growing number of fictional revisions of the women of Greek myth, including in Hauser's own trilogy.

My only quibble is that sometimes the suggestive archeological and scientific data seems to be a bit tacked on to the literary analysis.

I am a historian who went through many many courses on the Ancient Greeks and their stories and myths and never have I come across a book with so much focus, detail, and information on the women of Greece. I love reading retellings on the Ancient Greek myths because the original stories are always so hyper-focused on how great the men are and how awful the women are. This book gives me hope that such courses on the Greeks will include better information about the women of Ancient Greece.
Thank you so much for the opportunity to read this!

"So, Muse: tell me about a woman."

With this inversion of Homer's famous invocation, Emily Hauser sets the tone for "Penelope's Bones," a work that dares to center women not as literary devices or symbolic placeholders but as historical agents whose lives shaped and were shaped by the world behind Homer's epics. Hauser's aim is not to embellish or fictionalize; instead, she anchors her inquiry in hard evidence, pulling from archaeology, ancient DNA analysis, and literary criticism to recover the lived realities of women in the Late Bronze Age. This is not mythologizing; this is historical reconstitution.

For readers who assume this is another fictional reimagining of the Homeric world, it is not. Penelope's Bones is nonfiction, through and through. Its narrative is guided not by invention but by inquiry, and its revelations come from imaginative flourish and painstaking research. It is quite deliberately a reckoning with Homer, history, and the stories we have too long told at women's expense.

Hauser argues that women are indispensable, not peripheral, to the Iliad and Odyssey. Helen, Briseis, Hecuba, and Penelope are not background figures. They are narrative catalysts, cultural symbols, and historical enigmas worth serious scholarly attention. The book turns traditional Homeric interpretation on its head: instead of using the epics to illuminate the past, Hauser uses what we know of the past, from skeletal remains to palace tablets, to interrogate Homer. She challenges the long-standing literary and historical practice of relegating women to the margins of myth and memory.

The scope of the book is impressively wide-ranging. Hauser moves fluidly between discussions of Bronze Age political structures and the mechanics of international trade, from the intricacies of Linear B tablets to the spiritual roles of goddesses like Thetis and Athena. She draws from Mycenaean grave goods, Hittite diplomatic letters, shipwrecks, and isotopic bone data to reconstruct ancient women's material and social lives. Themes of war, slavery, kinship, inheritance, and cultural exchange are threaded through each chapter, with mythic figures serving as gateways into broader historical realities. Framed around individual women from Homer's epics, the book's organization grounds this interdisciplinary sweep in human stories, giving the reader a point of emotional and intellectual entry into each new domain of inquiry.

One of the book's most sobering and original contributions lies in its discussion of malnutrition among women in the Bronze Age Aegean, a subject Hauser handles with rigor and empathy. She presents a picture of widespread, systemic nutritional inequality by drawing on skeletal analysis, isotopic data, and administrative records from Linear B tablets. Women, particularly those enslaved or of lower status, were consistently underfed relative to men. This disparity left visible traces on their bones and teeth, from enamel hypoplasia to pelvic deformation. The consequences were harrowing: a narrowed pelvic structure, the result of childhood malnourishment, drastically increased the risk of death in childbirth. This biological fragility, coupled with social expectations of repeated pregnancies, created a deadly feedback loop. Hauser presents this as a parallel to the glorified deaths of men in battle, except here, the battlefield is the domestic sphere, and the death toll is quiet, private, and largely erased. It's one of the book's most potent arguments: that silence, too, is a form of historical violence.

Throughout, Hauser resists the temptation to romanticize the past. Her feminist lens is clear, but so is her historical discipline. She acknowledges where the evidence is fragmentary, where interpretations must remain speculative. Still, the interdisciplinary breadth of her research—combining archaeological data, literary analysis, and cutting-edge genetics, grounds her narrative in substance rather than sentiment. The result is a book that asks urgent questions about how we read ancient texts and the priorities and prejudices of the cultures that have shaped their interpretation.

At a time when the politics of storytelling are under intense scrutiny, "Penelope's Bones" offers both a challenge to inherited narratives and a blueprint for reimagining them. Hauser doesn't simply retell old tales; she interrogates the conditions that shaped them and the ideologies that preserved them. Penelope's Bones doesn't just reframe the Homeric world; it reclaims it.

This review is of an advance reader copy provided by NetGalley and University of Chicago Press.

I just could not get into this book. I kept picking it up and putting it back down. The flow of it was weird for me and I just kept finding myself rereading it and not remembering what I read or what was going on. I have dyslexia so some books are hard for me while others are not a problem and this one was just hard.

Women have often been delegated to the sidelines when discussing ancient history and are definitely not the focus of traditional analysis of the works of Homer. Emily Hauser’s new nonfiction book Penelope’s Bones is trying to change that. Each chapter uses a different woman in The Iliad or The Odyssey as a jumping off point to bring in scientific research, archeology, geology, and contemporary non-Greek sources to examine the lives of women in Greece at the time. And you can really feel how well researched each chapter is, but Emily Hauser does a great job balancing the research and bringing it back to how it relates to the women of Homer and the women of Ancient Greece as a whole. One of the most interesting but heartbreaking chapters was the one that went into the perils of childbirth and what mourning children looked like at the time. Something I really appreciated in the book was how it looked at how interconnected Greece was with all of the societies around it in the Mediterranean, such as the Hittites and Egyptians, which has often been overlooked in the Eurocentrism of studies of this period in the past.

I really enjoyed this book. It’s well researched and the writing is clear and easy to understand. I can see this as a great starter nonfiction to anyone who reads fictional Greek myth retellings. All in all I think anyone who has at least a passing interest in Greek mythology could get a lot out of this book.

(The opinions in this review are my own but I wish to thank Emily Hauser, University of Chicago Press, and NeGalley for this eARC.)

Writing as someone who thoroughly enjoyed Madeline Miller’s “Circe” and Natalie Haynes’ “A Thousand Ships,” but has since slogged through at least half a dozen works in a similar vein since then, “Penelope’s Bones” felt like a breath of fresh air. Through in-depth and well-research contextualization of various aspects of life in Bronze Age Greece framed through a selection of several female characters from the “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey,” Emily Hauser has frankly made these women come more alive to me than many, if not most of the mythological retellings I’ve read. The range of topics covered here in detail made for not just a wonderfully informative experience, but at times a genuinely eye-opening one as well.

Seriously, this book feels like an absolute must-read for those who have been hungering heavily for a hearty serving of history to go along with their contemporary rewrites of great Greek myths and epics.

I was incredibly excited for this book, and it did not disappoint. This book explores the Iliad and Odyssey through the women- Briseias, Helen, Circe, and, of course, Penelope just to name a few.

@emilyhauserauthor has such a talent for combining stories with research. Each chapter opens with a scene that ties the book back to the original text with and gives the perspective of the figure it follows. The remainder of the chapter then examines the archaeology and scholarship surrounding that figure in order to show what the actual women living in the bronze age may have experienced.

This is one of my favorite nonfiction books now. 10000/10, you should definitely read it!

This book is a great exploration of women’s studies in the context of Homer. Hauser explores the historical context of the fictional women in the Iliad and the Odyssey by using DNA, historical records, textiles, and more. For me, the success comes from highlighting the interconnectedness of the ancient world, and how historical records allow modern scholars to reexamine myth and the presence of women in male-centric texts. Hauser also emphasizes the work of female archaeologists, researchers, and historians which is a nice reminder of the importance of women’s involvement in history—especially when you notice that the majority of sources for historical interpretations of the myths and women Hauser focuses on are from men. It’s a great read if you’re at all interested in the history behind Homer and Greek archaeology, but there’s also a wealth of information on other ancient civilizations.

I received an ARC through NetGalley from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

This is an excellent non-fiction companion to novels like "A Thousand Ships" that explores Greek mythology from a feminine perspective. Dr. Emily Hauser's in depth exploration of who these women were, who they could have been, and what we can and can never know about them is fascinating and fresh. From well-known figures like Helen, Circe, and Aphrodite, to lesser-known but just as crucial characters like Briseis, Hecuba, and Nausicaa, this book discusses in as much detail as possible what is so often left out of history and mythology classes.

Thank you NetGalley and University of Chicago Press for the ARC.

WOW! I love this much more than I expected as someone who has never studied any of the classics to a full extent. I love how it’s written in a way that is accessible to *everyone* who wants to pick it up to learn about this.
This is a strong book that shows us just how people have chosen to make only the men seem strong and that myths are only for men when that isn’t true. The author does a beautiful job with the dedication to this study and sharing it with us as readers.

As a huge fan of Greek mythology, ancient history, and archaeology, this book was the perfect read. I loved that each chapter alternated between observing a different woman in Homer, and a topic related to that figure. The sheer range of topics - geography, textiles, architecture, weaponry, and more - was so fascinating. I had no idea that the Ithaca we know is practically the geographic opposite of Homer's Ithaca, or that the enamel on teeth could be used to figure out ancient diets. This book was so rich with information and I devoured all of it! I'm really looking forward to reading more of Emily Hauser's work in the future.
Thank you to NetGalley and University of Chicago press for the eARC!

Let's start with a bit of clarification: if you prefer your Greek mythology to remain fictional, this is not the book for you. This is a non-fiction look at the women depicted through Homer's works that breaks apart what we're used to reading about Helen, Circe, Athena, Calypso, and more. The research and care that was put into this book is highly apparent, and the sections are each compelling.

There are maps and other images added throughout that work nicely to add another layer to the book. That is one feature that I do think I'd enjoy more with a physical copy than via e-book, so if you're the same way, that is something to keep in mind.

All in all, this is a great book for anyone who is interested in a historical deep dive. It's written in a way that is refreshing and intriguing, and keeps clear focus on the subject matter.

((While the viewpoints shared are my own, I want to thank NetGalley, University of Chicago Press, & Emily Hauser for this complimentary copy.))

We need to get this out of the way first and foremost: what this book is. And what it is not.

It is NOT a retelling of The Iliad, The Odyssey, or any other Greek myth. It is NOT a work of fiction.

This book is an unflinchingly honest, real look at some historical, scientific, archaeological, and mythological canon information about some of the the key female characters within Homer, such as Helen, Aphrodite, Penelope, Athena, Circe, and Andromache along with others. This is not a "girl boss" examination of their character, making them superheroes or modern culture of 2025 appropriate figures. This book looks at the women in the context of the world and time in which they lived. And it was an ugly, brutal, harsh world indeed for women, and especially non-Greek women during the Trojan Wars.

The Aphrodite and Hera chapter in particular was incredible to me, but honorable mentions to the Thetis, Bryseis, and Circe chapters for being especially impactful to me as a lover of Greek myth, religion, and history. I've been thinking about some of the the DNA evidence factoids within the book for days now, and I suspect that they will continue to haunt me for weeks. The text is beautifully written and when it's fully published should have some detailed maps and art. I can't wait to see those diagrams!

This is a MUST BUY for anyone who wants more historical context around the Iliad and the Odyssey. Even though this book is focused around the women, it grants a lot of insight into the characters of Achilles, Odysseus, Hektor, Paris, and Telemachus to name a few.

I will absolutely be buying this when it releases later this year and telling all my Hellenic polytheist/Greek pagan friends and history lovers to pick this book up!

Thank you so very much to Emily Hauser, the publisher, and NetGalley for the advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!