Stripped of the charm of their youth and married off to foreign kings, the sisters soon realise that their bodies and desires are not their own either. But their beauty and royal standing comes at a price: their destinies are not their own. As princesses of Sparta, the sisters have lived a life of luxury, security and privilege. Daughters of Sparta explores the Siege of Troy and the events leading up to it from Helen and her sister Klytemnestra’s perspectives, beginning with the characters as young, naive girls. We’ve all heard the story of Helen of Troy, ‘the face that launched a thousand ships’, but so often her life is told through other characters’ viewpoints. But if Claire Heywood’s debut novel, Daughters of Sparta, tells us anything, it’s that the shadows where these women historically reside are where the truly interesting and impassioned tales take place. The women of the tale – Helen, Andromache, Briseis – are relegated to standing in the shadows of their powerful, proud and tempestuous husbands and masters as they embark on their fabled heroics.
Rewatching it now, I’m struck by something my younger self wasn’t: that for a mythical war waged on the pretext of rescuing a princess who was seduced and stolen from her home, Troy was very much a movie about men. I loved the drama, the tragedy, the ferocious combat between the Greeks and the Spartans. You may have heard of it… Loosely based on Homer’s Iliad, Wolfgang Petersen’s historical epic told the story of the Trojan War and was one of the most expensive films produced at the time. When I was a teenager, way back in the distant memory year of 2004, I fell in love with a little swords and sandals blockbuster known as Troy.
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