Publisher's Synopsis
In "The Authoress of the Odyssey" Butler advocated two theories: one that the Odyssey was the work of a woman, the other that it was written at Trapani, in Sicily. That his conclusions were not accepted by scholars is not surprising, but his arguments have never been refuted. Their improbability is nothing to the point, and their impossibility has yet to be demonstrated. That the weight of academic authority is against Butler counts for nothing to anyone who knows the history of Homeric criticism. Let those who regard the dicta of Oxford and Cambridge as final remember that Bentley read the Iliad and Odyssey without suspecting that they were the work of different generations, a fact which Sir Richard Jebb now claims to be beyond dispute. It has been urged in opposition to Butler's theory that, from the days of Sappho to those of Christina Rossetti no woman-poet has met with marked success save in works of brief compass and limited scope. Yet it is worth pointing out that a woman wrote the great Japanese classic romance "Genji Monogatari," a work which occupies to a certain extent the same position in Japanese literature that the Odyssey occupies in the literature of Greece. As a matter of fact, the notion of the female authorship of the Odyssey dates back to a very remote antiquity. Only a few weeks before his death Butler, to his great delight, found a passage in "Eustathius" which supported his theory, and it was a bitter disappointment to him that he was not well enough to write to the Athenaeum about it. The passage in question runs thus: "Tis said that one Naucrates has recorded how a woman of Memphis named Phantasia, daughter of Nicarinus, a professor of philosophy, composed both the story of the Trojan war and that of the wanderings of Ulysses, and placed the books in the temple of Hephæstus at Memphis, whereon Homer came there and, having procured a copy of the originals, wrote the Iliad and Odyssey. Some say that either he was an Egyptian born, or travelled to Egypt and taught the people there.In later times Butler's theory of the authorship of the Odyssey had been adumbrated by various critics. Bentley himself observed that the Iliad was written for men and the Odyssey for women, and Colonel Mure pointed out that in Phæacia "the women engross the chief part of the small stock of common sense allotted to the community." But the attitude of a writer towards the sexes is, of course, not conclusive, otherwise we should have to admit the femininity of the author of "A Doll's House " and "Ghosts." Even the extraordinary blunders in the Odyssey with regard to matters of common knowledge-the ship with a rudder at both ends, for instance, and the ewes which the Cyclops contrived to milk after their lambs had been with them all the night-need only persuade us that the poet was not a sailor or a farmer. But whether we agree or not with Butler's conclusions, " The Authoress of the Odyssey " is not a book to be received with contemptuous silence....--The Monthly Review, Volume 8
