The Lady is a lonely and doomed figure and Tennyson used her in several poems and plays, just as he used Fair Rosamond. The famous painting above of The Lady is by John William Waterhouse in 1888. The Lady resembles Calypso or Circe, or even Penelope, trapped in her unreality,

Although attributed to the poet Homer, who may have lived around 700 B.C.E., the Odyssey was forged into its brilliant form by oral storytellers over many hundreds of years. Then it was written down and reshaped again and again. Set in a time when a pantheon of gods

Odysseus finally returns to Ithaca after 19 years. Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad asks: would Penelope want him back? Is marriage an outdated institution, better suited to the days when people died in their 40s and 50s after raising children? With longer life-spans do we become bored with our

Over the centuries the Sirens have resisted easy definition. In the Odyssey, Book 12, when Circe is warning Odysseus about them, they are just creatures with a bewitching song. He has himself bound to the mast while all his crew have their ears blocked, and he gets past them unscathed.