The Ovidian Heroine as Author: Reading, Writing, and Community in the Heroides

LAUREL FULKERSON. The Ovidian Heroine as Author: Reading, Writing, and Community in the Heroides. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xii + 187 pp. Cloth, $75.

ovid's Heroides have traditionally received mixed reviews from readers and critics. John Dryden famously regarded them as ovid's "most perfect piece" of poetry, but he too saw imperfections in the collection. in the preface to his own english translation of the Heroides, he suggested that ovid's heroines are not altogether plausible as abandoned women, observing that they "are not too miserable to make puns" and that they frequently "speak more eloquently than the violence of their passion would admit." Grant showerman, similarly writing "in appreciation of the Heroides," offered the type of qualified praise that has now become commonplace in contemporary criticism of the letters, claiming that "The Heroides are not a work of the highest order of genius. Their language, nearly always artificial, frequently rhetorical, and often diffuse, is the same throughout-whether from the lips of barbarian Medea or sappho the poetess." L. P. wilkinson, whose project to rescue ovid's literary reputation in Ovid Recalled heralded the dawn of a modern renaissance in ovidian studies, likewise damned the Heroides with faint praise. He notoriously described the work as a stodgy "plum pudding," declaring that "the first slice is appetizing enough, but each further slice becomes colder and less digestible."

Cutting against this trend, Laurel Fulkerson's new book shows how tastes in the ovidian world have changed. building upon recent studies (specifically those by efi spentzou and sara Lindheim) that have confirmed the status of the written women of ovid's Heroides as reading and writing women, The Ovidian Heroine as Author offers a new approach to reading ovid's heroines and their letters. Across seven chapters, with an appendix on "The authenticity (and "authenticity") of Heroides 15," bibliography, index, and index locorum, this slender volume sets out to reevaluate the Heroides as both an inter- and intratextual community of authors and readers.

The Heroides are configured unequivocally as love letters from Penelope to Ulysses, briseis to Achilles, and so on. yet the heroines' letters frequently appear to be directed to other Heroidean readers: oenone's letter to Paris posits Helen as a potential (mis)reader, Hermione's letter to...