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Books on Mythology, Symbols & Women’s Inner Worlds
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items A little bookshelf of myths, symbols and women’s voices—where ancient stories meet our inner worlds, and strength takes many forms. Books to linger with, question with, and return to ourselves through
In The Odyssey, Circe gets a few pages and a bad reputation. Here she gets the whole story. Madeline Miller follows her from a lonely childhood in the hall of her father, the sun god Helios, to exile on her own island, where she learns witchcraft and...
Circe
A small one, and that's part of its charm. Galatea is a single short story, about 64 pages in a pocket-size hardcover, not a novel. Miller picks up the Pygmalion myth after the statue comes to life and lets Galatea tell what that “happy ending” was l...
Galatea
Pandora, Medusa, Jocasta, Penelope: most of us know these women from a line or two, often a line of blame. Classicist and comedian Natalie Haynes goes back to the ancient sources and shows how much richer and stranger their stories are. This is nonfi...
Pandora's Jar
This one sits on my shelf in Turkish, and it's a big book, more than 500 pages, best taken slowly. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, a Jungian analyst and storyteller, retells old tales such as Bluebeard, Vasalisa and La Loba, then reads each one as a story ab...
Women Who Run with the Wolves
Why do the same images keep showing up in dreams, fairy tales and old religions? This was the one book Carl Jung planned for general readers, written together with four of his colleagues. It explains his ideas about the unconscious, archetypes and sy...
Man and His Symbols
Not a mythology book, but it belongs on the women's-stories side of this list. Virginia Woolf starts with a simple question, what does a woman need in order to write, and lands on money and a room of her own. From there the essay wanders through hist...
A Room Of One's Own (annotated)
A young Irish woman wants to learn magic, and she finds two very different teachers: one who lives alone in a forest and one who works with the cycles of the moon. Paulo Coelho tells it in his simple, fable-like style, with rituals, symbols and talk ...
Brida
Artemis, Athena, Hestia, Hera, Demeter, Persephone and Aphrodite: Jean Shinoda Bolen, a psychiatrist and Jungian analyst, reads these seven Greek goddesses as patterns that can show up in women's lives, work and relationships. It's nonfiction, first ...
Goddesses in Everywoman: Thirtieth Anniversary Edition
Penelope is famous for waiting. Margaret Atwood finally lets her talk. In this short novel, written for the Canongate Myths series, Penelope looks back on her life with Odysseus from the afterlife, while her twelve maids answer between chapters like ...
The Penelopiad