The Authoress of the Odyssey: Where and When She Wrote, Who She Was, the Use She Made of the Iliad, and How the Poem Grew Under Her Hands

In 1897, Samuel Butler made a claim so audacious it stillstartles: the Odyssey was not written by Homer, but by a woman, and not just any woman, but the Phaeacian princess Nausicaa herself. This is not mere scholarly provocation it is a meticulously argued, brilliantly eccentric case built on geography, textual evidence, and a deep attention to what Butler calls the 'feminine' qualities of the poem. Having already spent years studying the poem's details, Butler noticed what mainstream classics dismissed: the Odyssey's domestic intimate scale, its interest in weaving and washing rather than warfare, its female characters who possess agency and interiority. He maps the poem's geography to Sicily, identifies the author'sblindness to mainland Greece, and argues that only a young woman like Nausicaa could have imagined herself into the poem's heroine-worship and erotic undercurrents. Butler writes with the wit of a novelist and the tenacity of a scholar who knows he is tilting at the establishment. Whether you accept his conclusion or not, this book will change how you read the Odyssey.