The Silence of the Girls Study Guide

Pat Barker (originally Patricia Drake) was born to her unmarried mother, Moyra, in 1943 and grew up in her grandmother and step-grandfather’s house. When Barker was seven years old, her mother married and left the household, where Barker remained. During Barker’s childhood, her grandparents’ small business failed, and the household fell into extreme poverty. Barker went on to attend the London School of Economics and received a history degree in 1965. In 1979, she married a professor of zoology named David Barker (to whom she remained married until his death in 2009). In 1982, she published her first novel, Union Street, about working-class English women, with the feminist publisher Virago Press. Her most famous novels may be the Regeneration trilogy—Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the Door (1993), and The Ghost Road (1995)—which examines the historical trauma of World War I. The Ghost Road won the prestigious Booker Prize in 1995. Over the course of her career, Barker has written more than a dozen novels, many of them historical fiction. In 2018, when she was in her seventies, she published The Silence of the Girls, a rewriting of the ancient Greek epic poem The Iliad from the perspective of the enslaved captive Briseis. The novel was shortlisted for the 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction. Her sequel to The Silence of the Girls, The Women of Troy, was published in 2021.

Homer’s Iliad—and Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls—deal with the Trojan War, a legendary conflict between the Greeks and Trojans in Greek mythology. Until the late 1800s, many scholars believed that the ancient myths of the Trojan War had no basis in historical fact. In the later decades of the nineteenth century, however, a German amateur archaeologist named Heinrich Schliemann (1822–1890) began excavating on the Trojan plain in Turkey and discovered a series of ancient cities that he believed may have been associated with the ancient Trojan culture described in the Homeric epics. Over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, a series of archeological discoveries and analyses led many scholars to conclude that a real war did occur between Trojan and Greek forces on the Trojan plain in the 12th century B.C.E.—although as the Homeric epics are believed to have been composed four centuries later, in the 8th century B.C.E., the relationship between the real war and the subsequent epics is likely to be tenuous.

The Silence of the Girls retells the ancient Greek epic poem The Iliad (c. 8th century B.C.E.), commonly attributed to Homer. It also references the other ancient Greek epic attributed to Homer, The Odyssey. While these two poems are considered foundational works in world literature, The Silence on the Girls highlights the misogyny and brutality casually referenced in the original poems by focusing on enslaved female war captives who only appear as minor characters and plot devices in the Homeric epics. Other contemporary novels that seek to retell the Homeric epics from a female perspective include Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2005), about Odysseus’s wife Penelope; and Madeline Miller’s Circe (2018), about the divine sorceress Circe. More generally, novels that attempt to retell literary classics from the perspective of marginalized characters include Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), which retells Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) from the perspective of Mr. Rochester’s first wife, and Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone (2001), which retells Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936) from the perspective of Scarlett O’Hara’s enslaved Black half-sister. Pat Barker published a sequel to The Silence of the Girls, called The Women of Troy, in 2021.