The Authoress of The Odyssey

The Authoress of The Odyssey is one of the most controversial books to emerge from the Humanities. The questions it raises challenge not only how we read Classical literature but how we judge flawed thinkers—today’s as well as those in the past.

More than a century before the rise of today’s Cancel Culture, author and polymath Samuel Butler—who famously predicted Artificial Intelligence while working as a sheep farmer in 1863—brought a radical and original intelligence to bear on Homer’s epics. In the face of opposition and mockery, he concluded that the author of The Odyssey was a young woman—“single and headstrong”.

In The Authoress, Butler lays out his argument step by step, challenging readers with his sharp rationalism while provoking them with prejudices reflective of his culture and troubled background.

Butler regarded his results as unarguable — and thought equally highly of his own genius. He was not pleased, however, by where his logic had led him. What he saw as evidence of female authorship struck him also as evidence of artistic inadequacy. The Authoress therefore came to be seen as both a hatchet job on one of our civilisation’s most revered texts and a test case in Victorian misogyny.

From a distance of more than 125 years, it is easy to dismiss Butler’s findings as no less distasteful than his biases. And yet, despite his flaws, The Authoress pioneered the analytical paradigm of Practical Criticism that would dominate literary inquiry at the highest level for the next half-century.

In that context, The Authoress forces us to confront an urgent and topical moral dilemma now haunting academia: how do we avoid shutting down difficult ideas because we dislike their source?