Will I love Lavinia?

Lavinia, bride of Aeneas in Virgil's Aeneid, gets a bare handful of mentions in that tale, scarcely enough to make her a living being. LeGuin gives her voice and life in this lyrical, fantastical book, in which Lavinia converses with the dying poet and forms her own shape and the life he could not give her. A beautifully realized ancient world.

Romance isn't the only genre I read, of course. Lavinia is written by one of my favorite authors, Ursula K LeGuin. This historical fiction novel takes a character from the ancient Aeneid and brings her to life.

In the Aeneid, Lavinia is the prize for Aeneas. But, she never speaks. Not even one word. LeGuin decided to fix that. She gives Lavinia her own story and journey. In doing so, she creates a rich protagonist who takes destiny into her own hands. 

LeGuin traditionally writes science fiction. I love how this female writer in a male-dominated genre… show more.

In Vergil's Aeneid, Lavinia is a princess destined to marry the hero Aeneas and bear him a son who will be the ancestor of Julius Caesar. Le Guin makes Lavinia the center of her story. Her Lavinia is not a passive prize for the Trojan warrior, but a young woman attempting to find her way in a society that does not offer even princesses many opportunities for choice. 

But what’s really meaningful to me is the way Le Guin enters the world of another writer's story and creates her own based on it, remaining faithful to the original but… show more.

Lavinia’s marriage is at the centre of the conflict in the second half of Virgil’s Aeneid – will she marry Turnus, her betrothed, or will she marry Aeneas, the newly-arrived Trojan upstart? Yet famously all we really find out about Lavinia and how she feels about this situation is her blush before the final battle begins; she never actually speaks. Le Guin remedies this silence by telling the story of the Trojans’ arrival from Lavinia’s perspective, visited by a ghostly Virgil in visions, and giving a different perspective to stories of war and conflict.