Who’s That Lady?: Women’s Historical Fiction and the Experience of Antiquity

Type the phrase “women’s historical fiction” into Google, and you will be met with a results page numbering approximately 2 million entries, featuring historical fiction set in every conceivable period of history, from ancient Egypt to 1950s America and everything in between. While certain periods seem to always dominate the market — the Tudor era is a remarkably popular one — I want to focus today on a subgenre of women’s historical fiction that depicts women of the ancient world. Indeed, beginning in the latter part of the 2000s, various ancient women became the subject of their own stories, often told in their own voices, part of what has been understood as an experiment on the part of publishers with the viability of the ancient world. While the roots of this can be located in the 1990s with the work of such authors of Margaret George — famous for her novel The Memoirs of Cleopatra — and Colleen McCullough and her “Masters of Rome” series, I focus here on three authors whose recent work has focused on women of antiquity: Kate Quinn (author of the Empress of Rome series), Stephanie Dray (author a series about Cleopatra Selene), and Stephanie Thornton (author of three books depicting the lives of Hatshepsut, Theodora wife of Justinian, and the wife and mother of Alexander the Great).