Homer's Daughter

Nausicaa, a Sicilian princess of the eighth century B.C., looks back on the events of her life and tells how she came to write the epic poem known as the Odyssey. |...| "To this charming novel Mr. Graves has brought all the psychological and archaeological skill which made his earlier recreations memorable. He is especially good at bringing back the feel of things....His prose is like the songs of Phemios the minstrel: pure art, uncompromising and direct." -- Robert Graves |...| "Nausicaa is a witty and resourceful girl, and her story is exceedingly entertaining and as full of suspense as a really good detective story." -- New York Times |...| Graves has recreated another strong and convincing historical setting; this time the scene of the Odyssey, which he believes occurred in Western Sicily. Graves believes also that the author of the Odyssey was not the blind and bearded Homer of legend, but the young woman who calls herself Nausica in the story. ===Robert Graves was a poet, professor, and the author of Goodbye to All That (1929), a landmark anti-heroic memoir of life in the trenches during World War I. He is even better known for his historical novels about the Roman emperor Claudius: I, Claudius (1934) and Claudius the God (1935). Despite those successes, Graves was primarily a poet: he published dozens of volumes of his verse during his life, and was professor of poetry at Oxford from 1961-66. Graves lived most of his adult life on the island of Majorca, at first with fellow poet Laura Riding, and later with his second wife Beryl Hodge.