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A monumental biography of Edith Hamilton, America's best-known popular interpreter of ancient Greece, this volume does full justice to both her scholarly interests and political commitments. Born to easy circumstances, Hamilton came of age at a time of unparalleled academic and civic possibilities for women. Although her family circumstances were reduced after she left school, she was not only able to attend Bryn Mawr College but also to pursue graduate study in Germany, eventually receiving her BA and MA from Bryn Mawr. Lacking both the means and the interest to pursue a PhD, she took up a position as headmistress of Bryn Mawr College School in Baltimore, which she held for 26 years. On her resignation, she and her future life partner, Doris Reid (her former student), settled in New York City, where Hamilton began her writing career, publishing her first book, The Greek Way, at the age of 62. For the next 30 years she published steadily, eventually gaining recognition from professional classicists. An outspoken proponent of the wisdom of the ancients, she was also a thoroughly modern woman of intellectual, political, and sexual commitments well in advance of her time.Summing Up: Essential. All readers

Hauser (Univ. of Exeter, UK) points out, first, the absence in ancient Greek of a proper term to designate women as poets; she then demonstrates the rejection on the part of women poets of the terms that were traditionally employed by and for their male counterparts (aoidos, and later, poietes); finally, she shows how women developed their own terms to describe their poetic activity. In searching for these terms Hauser treats the reader to an exhaustive review of all types of texts, from the Homeric poems to Hellenistic epigrams, including oracles and inscriptions. The result is an exciting and elegant survey of the entire ancient Greek literary tradition as a male construction, a book that forces the reader to rethink many common assumptions about "women's" poetry from antiquity to today. That Hauser succeeds, given the meager evidence for women's poetry that has come down through time, is testimony to her sensitivity and meticulous scholarship. Women, Hauser shows, had to make a case for their own existence as poets and for their right to authorship. An important book for all who are interested in Greek poetry and gender in antiquity and beyond.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.