Shanyn Fiske. Heretical Hellenism: Women Writers, Ancient Greece and theVictorian Popular Imagination. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-8214-1817-8. Price: US$40

Shanyn Fiske’s monograph is the latest in a growing body of research that investigates how classical texts have influenced nineteenth-century writing and performance and how Greek material in particular has been refocused in ways that cut against the grain of expectations. Fiske’s approach is ambitious. She regards previous studies as overly concerned with female authors who worked closely with the original texts. She thinks that such studies carry the implication, however unintended, that the value of women’s relationship with the Greek sources is directly dependent on their ability to engage with them through cultivating a linguistic expertise that matched (or, in practice, often had to exceed) that of their male counterparts. Fiske’s intention is therefore to focus on other types of interactions between Greek texts and women’s writing, concentrating on writers who either did not know Greek or who were not confident in their own scholarship. Some preferred to use mediating translation or criticism to inform their interest in Hellenism. This focus is productive and potentially valuable in supplementing text-based concerns with a broader-based awareness of the varied ways in which Greek literature and scholarship permeated other fields of activity. Although the copy on the jacket of the book does Fiske no service in claiming that “The prevailing assumption regarding the Victorians’ relationship to ancient Greece is that Greek knowledge constituted an exclusive discourse within elite male domains,” it is clear from her much more nuanced discussions that she is fully engaged, not only with recent work in the field, but also with many of the research questions that are needed in order to extend it. In its approach to ancient texts Fiske’s study is well-informed by, and sometimes in productive dialogue with, the work of Edith Hall and Fiona Macintosh on burlesque and the history of theatre in Britain, with Isobel Hurst’s Victorian Women Writers and the Classics (2006) and with Yopie Prins’ studies of female poetics and nineteenth-century conceptions of Hellenism. Some attention to Nick Lowe’s The Classical Plot and the Invention of Western Narrative (2000) would have informed her discussion on narrative forms and themes. Fiske also draws on recent scholarship in women’s writing, cultural history, popular culture and social change. Her book does, however, lack a consistent rationale for how some key terms are used (notably “popular” and “imagination”) and might have benefited from the setting out a framework of investigation to enable closer comparisons between the case studies (cf. the agenda proposed by Edith Hall in “Putting the Class into Classical Reception,” a chapter in in Lorna Hardwick and Christopher Stray’s Companion to Classical Receptions (2008). The bibliography testifies to the breadth of Fiske’s scholarship and is a mine of useful pointers that will be of interest to anyone who is willing to work across disciplines to investigate the mutual relevance of fields as diverse as those of education, sexuality, history of the book, translation, and hermeneutics. Fiske’s initial claim is that her book studies “the diffusion of Greek myth, literature, and history throughout Victorian popular culture” (17). This is a huge ambition. However, she goes on to explain carefully that her mapping and analysis of what might be called “popular Greek” is to be conducted through case studies, each of which focuses on one aspect of women’s relationship to Greek in popular culture. This does tighten the lens but also immediately involves a daunting range of primary sources, among which her use of periodicals and personal essays stand out. Her argument in two of the main chapters is based on the assumption that it was the novel that provided the imaginative forum for engagement …