The Ovidian Heroine as Author: Reading, Writing, and Community in the Heroides. By 
LAUREL FULKERSON. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xi + 187. Cloth, 
$75.00. ISBN 0–521–84672–2.

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     Recent scholarship on the Heroides, indeed on Ovid in general, has pursued four 
major lines of inquiry: genre, allusion, narrative and relationship to Augustus. How does 
the poet manipulate generic conventions? In what ways does he display his obsessive 
awareness of the literary texts that come before him? How does he tell his story? What 
kind of connection does he draw, implicitly or explicitly, between himself and the 
princeps? Laurel Fulkerson’s (F.) study of the Heroides engages with all these issues, 
adding to the mix a feminist interest in the representation of the literary and mythical 
heroines who write elegiac epistles to heroes who have abandoned them.

     Asserting her place among feminist interpretations of the Heroides that seek to 
explore what happens when female characters, usually secondary to the traditional, 
canonical versions of their stories, take control of the narrative, [n. 1] F. suggests that 
we reconsider the failure generally attributed to these female authors. While interpreters 
often emphasize the heroines’ inability to persuade their lovers to return, as readers 
know from their intertextual habits of suturing endings from source texts onto the Ovidian 
epistles, F. asks us to measure success otherwise. The heroines engage intratextually 
with one another’s letters; they avidly peruse each other’s missives, finding within their 
counterparts’ epistles compelling readings of stories and/or actualizations of women. At 
times, suggests F., a heroine might even influence events, becoming the catalyst for the 
outcome we expect from the literary tradition. The turn from intertext to intratext, from 
isolated heroines to women in a community, offers new insights into the poems, and 
especially into the repetitive nature of the women and their stories in the Heroides.

     In her first chapter, “Reading dangerously,” F. argues that Phyllis has carefully read 
the letters written by Dido, Ariadne and Medea, and actively chooses to construct herself 
in the manner of her abandoned sisters despite the contrary evidence available from her 
source text, and despite the alternative model provided by Penelope in Heroides 1. The 
second chapter, “Reading the future,” however, shows that power within the community 
of heroines circulates in more complex ways. Medea and Hypsipyle, the only women who 
write letters to the same hero, seem to influence each other: Hypsipyle introduces herself 
as a witch (like Medea), while Medea attempts to downplay those parts of her character 
that detract from a self-representation as an innocent, inexperienced woman (like 
Hypsipyle). Hypsipyle, qua sorceress, utters a blood-curdling curse that Medea, now 
enjoying Jason’s loving attentions, should herself be abandoned by Jason for another, 
bereft of her children and forced into exile. Does Hypsipyle’s curse cause Medea’s literary 
afterlife? Does Oenone, who immediately precedes Hypsipyle in Ovid’s collection, find in 
Hypsipyle a powerful model, as the nymph launches her own curse against Helen?
 
     Chapters 3 and 4 demonstrate the surprising power that epistles, deemed a failure in 
their intertextual context, have on an intratextual audience. Canace, sentenced to death 
by her father, sends her brother a letter she has expressly crafted for a double audience, 
her brother-lover and her father. While this strategy of composition fails Canace, since 
she herself does not escape death, her rhetoric saves her son, and also Hypermestra 
who, in Heroides 14, appropriates Canace’s rhetorical strategy of writing for a double 
audience (lover and father), and lives. Like Canace, Briseis fails; the captive woman’s 
attempts to locate herself in the center of the story of the Trojan War gain little traction. 
Hermione, however, benefits tremendously in her self-presentation from her reading of 
Briseis’ missive.

     F. explores the connections between the letters of Laodamia and her aunt Deianira in 
Chapter 5, “Reading magically.” The women in this family possess considerable skill in 
killing their husbands. Viewing her situation through the prism of her aunt’s example, 
Laodamia suffers from an excessive suspicion which leads her to write down things that 
should not be written; unwittingly she curses Protesilaus to the death awaiting him in the 
source texts. Other family bonds prove equally problematic, as F. shows in Chapter 6. 
Phaedra draws on the example of her mother Pasiphae, who entered into an extra-marital 
relationship with a bull, and of her sister Ariadne, who betrayed her family because of 
her love for Theseus, only to be callously abandoned by the hero while she was sleeping. 
Phaedra appropriates Ariadne’s version of Theseus in Heroides 10, casting herself in her 
own epistle as another of his victims, while simultaneously seeking to recreate the 
intensity of her sister’s innocent passion in a relationship with Hippolytus. But Hippolytus 
is Phaedra’s stepson, and her attempts to reprise the story of her sister fade into a 
restaging of Pasiphae’s monstrous yearning.

     If Phaedra has misread, Ariadne appears rather powerful. The heroine of Heroides 10, 
argues F., exerts tremendous influence over the Ovidian collection. In her conclusion, F. 
links the power of the heroine to that of the poet, particularly in the face of the political 
power of Augustus. With a glance toward Ovid’s exilic poetry, F. shows that the princeps 
can exile Ovid to Tomis, but ultimately Ovid’s literary reception is out of Augustus’ hands.
F.’s analysis invites consideration of the epistles from angles that do not receive explicit 
treatment in her monograph. One question already on the table in Heroidean scholarship 
is the extent to which we as readers, and the heroines as writers, remain at the mercy of 
source texts. [n. 2] While F.’s readings of the heroines’ words demonstrate that she sees 
considerable latitude for them, she might have explored this issue more fully where Ovid 
is concerned. To what extent does the poet consider himself caught in the prison of the 
literary texts that precede him? To what degree can he change a story we all know? And 
why, when he seeks to explore this issue, does he use a woman’s voice?
 
     That F.’s work raises further questions, however, is only to the good. This book, clear, 
well-written and tightly organized, belongs on the shelf of all those interested in the 
Heroides, Ovid and the power of literature.

SARA H. LINDHEIM 
University of California, Santa Barbara

[n. 1] An early and influential article is Marilynn Desmond, “When Dido Reads Vergil: 
Gender and Intertextuality in Ovid’s Heroides 7,” Helios 20 (1993) 56–68. The most recent 
book-length studies are Sara H. Lindheim, Mail and Female: Epistolary Narrative and 
Desire in Ovid’s Heroides (Madison, 2003), and Efrossini Spentzou, Readers and Writers in 
Ovid’s Heroides: Transgressions of Genre and Gender (Oxford, 2003). 

[n. 2] The key text here is Alessandro Barchiesi, “Future Reflexive: Two Modes of Allusion 
and Ovid’s Heroides,” HSCP 95 (1993) 333–65.


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