Summary: Women who have written and published books about their travels in Greece form a little-known literary genre. They include a nineteenth-century British composer, a beloved teacher of composition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a contemporary American poet, and a Greek-American with a literary pedigree who worked as a wedding consultant for Martha Stuart. Some truly intrepid philhellenes have traveled in Greece and written about it, but their work has not been published. One was Eva Palmer Sikelianos, the subject of a recent magisterial biography by Artemis Leontis. Another was a lover of classical archeology who devoted her energies to the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. None of these women were academics or classicists or modern Greekists. Others have traveled in Greece in the abstract, by way of words, through private study of the classics. Virginia Woolf falls into this category. What we have in common, besides a love of Greece, is the determination to write about it.
Suggested Readings:
A Three-Legged Tour in Greece, by Ethel Smyth (1927)
Greece By Prejudice, by Daphne Athas (1962)
Dinner with Persephone, by Patricia Storace (1996)
North of Ithaca, by Eleni N. Gage (2004)
Eva Palmer Sikelianos: A Life in Ruins, by Artemis Leontis (2019)
By One and One, by Doreen Canaday Spitzer (1984)
Ladies’ Greek, by Yopie Prins (2017)
Edith Hamilton: An Intimate Portrait, by Doris Fielding Reid (1967)
“On Not Knowing Greek” in The Common Reader, by Virginia Woolf (1925)
“Virginia Woolf’s ‘Greek Notebook,’” by Theodore Koulouris, in Woolf Studies Annual, Volume 25 (2019)
Pomegranate Years, by Sarah Kafatou (2019)
Afternoons in Ithaca, by Spiri Tsintziras (2014)
Living with a Dead Language, by Ann Patty (2017)