Emily Hauser (1999-01)
Like many of the most fortunate Old Orwellians, I was lucky enough to be taught by Bob Bass during my time at Orwell (1999-2001). Not only did Bob instil in me a deep love of learning Latin and finding out about the myths of the ancient world—he also gave up his spare time to teach me Greek on the side. I still remember the thrill of learning the Greek alphabet, unlocking an ancient language that looked so strange and foreign, discovering meaning amongst the disorderly black squiggles on the page.
The result was that, when I left Orwell at the age of thirteen, I was already passionate about Classics—and I knew, even then, that I was going to go on to study Classics at university. (I distinctly remember this, as I wrote Bob a letter telling him so.) Little did I know how far that love of Classics would take me—and that it would eventually become my career, both as a university lecturer, and as a writer of novels retelling the Greek myths.
I’ve always loved writing, and have written my whole life; but it wasn’t until I was taking a course at Yale (where I did my PhD in Classics) and we read Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad that I really discovered what I wanted to write about. The Penelopiad is a brilliant retelling of the Odyssey from Penelope’s perspective: sharp, witty, and feminist in its re-voicing of the women who were written out of ancient epic. I had written on Homer’s Iliad for my undergraduate thesis at Cambridge, and on reading Atwood I thought: why had no-one ever tried to write the story of the Iliad from the women’s point of view? And so my first novel, For the Most Beautiful (Penguin Random House, 2016), which retells the tale of the captive women of Troy in the Greek camp, was born. Two more novels followed in a trilogy of reworkings of the women of Greek myth: For the Winner (2017), which tells the story of Atalanta, the only woman to join the voyage of Jason and the Argonauts; and For the Immortal (2018), which brings to life the ancient warrior-women, the Amazons.
In 2018, I took up my current position at the University of Exeter as Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History—which means that my current focus is on writing my first academic book. Titled Authoress: Gendering Poets in Ancient Greece, it looks at the gendering of the canon of Greek literature (and the subsequent male-gendering of the western canon) through the terms that poets used to refer to themselves and others. Ancient Greek was a gendered language, meaning that the very word for “poet” was gendered male—leading to all kinds of assumptions about what it meant to be a writer, and the fact that you had to be a man to do so. However, I’m still very much interested in retelling the stories of the women of the ancient world through fiction—and another novel is definitely on the horizon!
Emily’s novels are available to buy at Waterstones, on Amazon and at all good bookshops, and are recommended for ages 11+. You can find out more at her website or follow her on Twitter @ehauserwrites
