The Private Life Of Helen Of Troy

“A humorous, wise, and beautiful book” about Helen’s life following the notorious scandal (The New York Times). Picking up after the Trojan War, this novel follows the reunion of Helen of Troy with Menelaus and their return to Sparta together. A bestseller in its day and a clever take on the ancient myth from the female point of view, it explores Helen’s feelings about the two men in her life and her reflections on marriage in general, the power and perils of beauty, and the strains on a relationship after a dramatic disruption. Originally published in the wake of the women’s suffrage movement, The Private Life of Helen of Troy is a witty, inventive novel casting one of the great characters of Western literature in the starring role.

"The Private Life of Helen of Troy" is a novel by John Erskine, an American educator, author, pianist, and composer and the first president of the Juilliard School of Music. The novel was adapted from the Greek legend of Helen of Troy and followed the famous woman's life after the burning of Troy.

This examination of the private life of Helen of Troy was first published in 1925, then made into a silent film in 1927. Adapted from the Greek legend, this novel focuses on Helen's life after the burning of Troy.

"The story of Helen of Troy has its origins in ancient Greek epic and didactic poetry, more than 2500 years ago, but it remains one of the world's most galvanizing myths about the destructive power of beauty. Much like the ancient Greeks, our own relationship to female beauty is deeply ambivalent, fraught with both desire and danger. We worship and fear it, advertise it everywhere yet try desperately to control and contain it. No other myth evocatively captures this ambivalence better than that of Helen, daughter of Zeus and Leda, and wife of the Spartan leader Menelaus. Her elopement with (or abduction by) the Trojan prince Paris "launched a thousand ships" and started the most famous war in antiquity. For ancient Greek poets and philosophers, the Helen myth provided a means to explore the paradoxical nature of female beauty, which is at once an awe-inspiring, supremely desirable gift from the gods, essential to the perpetuation of a man's name through reproduction, yet also grants women terrifying power over men, posing a threat inseparable from its allure. Many ancients simply vilified Helen for her role in the Trojan War but there is much more to her story than that: the kidnapping of Helen by the Athenian hero Theseus, her sibling-like relationship with Achilles, the religious cult in which she was worshipped by maidens and newlyweds, and the variant tradition which claims she never went to Troy at all but was whisked away to Egypt and replaced with a phantom. In this book, author Ruby Blondell offers a fresh look at the paradoxes and ambiguities that Helen embodies. Moving from Homer and Hesiod to Sappho, Aeschylus, Euripides, and others, Helen of Troy shows how this powerful myth was continuously reshaped and revisited by the Greeks. By focusing on this key figure from ancient Greece, the book both extends our understanding of that culture and provides a fascinating perspective on our own." - Besedilo s knjižnega zavihka.

"After Troy, Helen re-established herself in the home. It will be seen that apart from her divine beauty and entire frankness she was a conventional woman." Adapted from the Greek legend of Helen of Troy who was said to have been the most beautiful woman in the world, the story of this book is set after the burning of Troy. Written by John Erskine, one of the pioneers of the Great Books movement in the 1930s, the novel topped the bestseller list in 1926. This premium edition comes with an Easy to Read Layout which makes reading comfortable.