Odyssey - Samuel Butler (essay date 1897)

Samuel Butler (essay date 1897)

SOURCE: "Who Was the Writer?", in 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, 1897. Reprint by University of Chicago Press, 1967, pp. 200-09.

[An English novelist, satirist, essayist, and translator, Butler is best known for his The Way of All Flesh (1903), an autobiographical novel that satirizes Victo-rian church and family life. As a Homeric scholar, Butler achieved notoriety for his The Authoress of the Odyssey, in which he propounded the theory that the Odyssey was written by a woman. In the following excerpt from that work, he contends that the Odyssey was written by Nausicaa, a young woman from Trapani and a member of King Alcinous's household, rather than by Homer.]

I Believe … that the Odyssey was written by one woman, and … that this woman knew no other...

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