Character Catalog

A foundational epic in twenty-four books in which Penelope is a central figure. She embodies conjugal virtue, cunning, and patience as she faces the suitors besieging her palace.

A fictional verse letter in elegiac couplets in which Ovid gives voice to Penelope, expressing her despair, her hope, and her faithfulness. This text inaugurates a tradition of retelling the Homeric myth from a female perspective.

A celebrated Pre-Raphaelite canvas depicting Penelope at her loom, the very symbol of the waiting woman. This work played a major role in fixing the romantic and melancholic image of the character in the modern Western imagination.

A contemporary retelling of the Odyssey from the perspective of Penelope and her twelve handmaids. Atwood offers a feminist and critical reading of the myth, restoring a voice to the female characters marginalized by tradition.

A modernist novel that reinterprets the Odyssey in twentieth-century Dublin. The final chapter (Penelope) is a long interior monologue by Molly Bloom, Penelope's alter ego, and has become one of the most celebrated passages in world literature.

Although not directly linked to Penelope, the frescoes from Mycenaean palaces depicting noblewomen at court illustrate the visual and social world in which the myth of Penelope first took shape.

"But the wise Penelope had devised another stratagem: she had set up a great loom in her chambers and begun to weave a fine and very large shroud. She told us: Young men, my suitors, since the noble Odysseus is dead, wait until I have finished this cloth."

"While you were fighting beneath the walls of Troy, I remained here weeping. My loom, a futile ruse, kept me company. I feared everything, and love magnifies fears."

"At Sparta, a place is pointed out where Penelope, they say, wove her web; the inhabitants venerate her memory as a symbol of conjugal virtue."

A tale transmitted orally by the aoidoi of the Greek Epic Cycle, recounting Penelope's resistance against the suitors in the megaron of the palace of Ithaca, before being set down in writing in the tradition attributed to Homer.

Fragment evoking the fate of Penelope after Odysseus's return, and her supposed connections with Telegonus, son of Odysseus and Circe.

A rocky island in the Ionian Sea, kingdom of Odysseus and home of Penelope during the twenty years of her husband's absence. This is where most of the Odyssey takes place, in the royal palace perched on the heights.

The great central hall of the royal palace of Ithaca, where Penelope receives the suitors, where the bow contest takes place, and where the final massacre occurs. A symbolic space of domestic power and dramatic reversal.

The legendary city in Anatolia whose war and fall cause Odysseus's prolonged absence. For Penelope, Troy represents the distant cause of twenty years of solitude, veiled mourning, and waiting.

Telemachus travels here to gather news of his father; Penelope, who was Helen's cousin according to some traditions, is said to have had family ties with this city herself. Sparta venerated the memory of Penelope as a model of conjugal virtue.

The stretch of sea that separates Ithaca from the wider world, upon which Penelope fixes her waiting gaze. The sea is both obstacle and promise — the horizon that the palace's inhabitants scan every day in hope of seeing Odysseus return.