![]() ![]() ![]() (I loved the comment by the poet about being in a dark, dark wood.) All Lavinia knows is what’s expected of her as the daughter of the king of Latium. Near the beginning of Lavinia, the woman herself begins to hear the voice of a dying poet who tells Lavinia what’s going to happen to her in the coming months and years. Then, she added a layer of Le Guin master story-telling. Le Guin discusses in her notes at the end of the book that, even with all the research she did, she still had to exercise her imagination to fill in the gaps. Lavinia is a historical figure, but between Virgil and Roman founding myths, we don’t know much about it. So when I heard that Ursula Le Guin gave voice to a woman who wasn’t given dialogue in The Aenied in Lavinia, I jumped to read it, to see what she would say for herself. What I remember is a lot of stabbing, gods ex machina–ing, and women being treated like pawns. When I was an undergraduate, I took a classical literature class in which I read the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aenied(at least, enough of the content to get the gist of things, otherwise I would have gone blind). ![]()
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