📚 This won’t be the last time

Felicia Day is an actress best known for her web video work, including creating and starring in The Guild. The Last Daughter of Sparta is her third book and her graphic novel debut. Below is an excerpt about her inspiration behind the book.

According to ancient sources, the goddess Aphrodite was angered by King Tyndareus of Sparta, so she cursed all his daughters to betray their husbands. That curse included, surprisingly, the infamous Helen of Troy. 

Helen has always been an enigma to me. Was she a gorgeous but misunderstood mean girl? Victim of assault? Unrepentant adulterer and war-bringer? There’s no consistent interpretation. But it had never occurred to me that Helen could have been forced to create all that chaos because of a curse. 

I’ve read Madeline Miller’s Circe and many other novels exploring modern interpretations of ancient Greek female characters, and I love all of them. So with this tidbit of knowledge I’d found, I thought I might have an interesting angle on writing about Helen herself. So I started researching. And through that research, I stumbled upon something I found even more interesting: the existence of my soon-to-be hero and lost youngest sister of Helen, Philonoe. 

The earliest mention of her is from Catalogue of Women, whose fragments survive from the sixth century BCE: 

And Phylonoe whose body was most like the immortal goddesses. 

Her . . . the arrow bearing goddess 

Made immortal and ageless for all days. 

“Made immortal”? But . . . why?! 

This throwaway line from more than twenty-five hundred years ago lit my brain on fire. Despite searching every archive, blog, and academic article I could access, I couldn’t find any more information on this Spartan princess. In fact, the only thing I could find was a single blog entry highlighting the fact that no one knows anything about her. It was a mystery dying to be interpreted. 

I set out to create a hero’s journey for a female hero of ancient Greece, with a story as epic and romantic as Hercules’s, Theseus’s, Perseus’s, or Jason’s. I aimed to justify a mention of a character whose authentic history had been lost to time, like the stories of so many women in the ancient world. Accompanied by the brilliant art of my collaborator, Rowan MacColl, I couldn’t be prouder of the story we’ve told.

Excerpted from THE LOST DAUGHTER OF SPARTA by Felicia Day. Copyright © by Felicia Day. Reprinted by permission of Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.