Helen of Troy

Historical fiction author Margaret George’s 2006 novel Helen of Troy tells the story of the famously beautiful woman whose uncompromising love affair started the Trojan War of Homer’s Iliad. Instead of simply rehashing the same story, George approaches the mythical epic from Helen’s own perspective. As this queen narrates her life story, we benefit from George’s research into life in ancient Mycenae, as the novel’s rich details and specific description help to demystify Helen from an otherworldly creature into a real woman whose extraordinary life highlights rather than diminishes her humanity.

Helen is born from the union of the god Zeus and the human Queen of Sparta, Leda, whose husband, Tyndareus accepts his wife’s explanation of her pregnancy when he sees the startling appearance of the new baby. As she grows alongside her twin brothers, Castor and Pollux, the king and queen are so worried about the effect of her beauty on those around her that they insist Helen wear a veil – a veil that George extends to her readers by never actually describing what Helen looks like beyond a reference to her golden hair.

Instead, because we are inside Helen’s head, we see the pains she takes to keep her personality as subdued as possible to counter the provocation of her appearance, remaining an observer rather than a doer. We learn about her looks through the way other people react. For example, when she is still prepubescent, she is kidnapped by Theseus, King of Athens, and Pirithous, King of Larissa, whose plan is to raise her until one of them can have sex with her – a plan that is only averted when Helen’s brothers rescue her. The horror of this trauma convinces her parents that to protect their daughter, they must marry her off as quickly as possible.



After King Odysseus gets all the possible suitors to swear an oath to defend the honor of Helen's future husband, Tyndareus selects the much older Spartan King Menelaus as her husband. By the time she is in her early twenties, Helen has had four children with Menelaus – Hermione, Aethiolas, Maraphius, and Pleisthenes – and has resigned herself to a loveless marriage. Menelaus and his brother Agamemnon, in the meantime, pine for adventure and heroics, regretting the surrounding peace in which they “have to content [oneself] with cattle raids and minor skirmishes” at most.

Of course, it is always dangerous in Greek mythology to wish for things – they often come true with an ironic vengeance. In this case, adventure and heroics come to Menelaus in the guise of Paris, a prince of Troy. The goddess Aphrodite has promised Paris the love of the most beautiful woman in the world in exchange for his vote in a goddess beauty contest. Menelaus treats Paris as befits a royal guest, but Paris only has eyes for Helen – who, with Aphrodite’s intervention – falls in love with him in return. The first night of his visit, they kiss at the sacred shrine of Helen’s snake. During dinner, he writes "PARIS LOVES HELEN" in wine on the table. He is still a teenager, seven years younger than Helen, and his passion and excitement are a complete contrast to Menelaus’s middle age.

Aphrodite’s magic works too well. When even Paris has doubts about whether their affair is a good idea, Helen talks him into running away with her back to Troy. They take some of Menelaus’s tremendous stores of gold with them, but leave her daughter Hermione behind – since Helen still loves Sparta, she “will not leave it bereft of a queen.”



An enraged Menelaus invokes the oath that all Greek kings swore to defend the honor of Helen’s husband, collecting a thousand-ship army. The war plays out as Homer described it, although, in Helen’s eyes, the characters of the major players are reversed. The ferocious Greek warrior Achilles, who is the “laudable existential hero” of the Iliad, is here instead portrayed as an unremittingly violent force of brutality. On the other hand, Paris doesn’t come off as a young would-be hotshot who is in over his head. Instead, Helen sees him as heroic and noble even before he heroically kills the invincible Achilles on the field of battle, thus redeeming himself in the eyes of his aged father, King Priam.

In any case, after ten years of war, Troy is destroyed – as we see through the eyes of Helen as she watches King Priam and Queen Hecuba succumb to despair. Paris also dies, after suffering an infection from a seemingly minor wound that festers, killing him through the disfigurement and pain of sepsis. In the wake of his death, Paris’s brother Deiphobus, the only one of King Priam’s sons still left alive to fight, tries to get Helen to marry him as a nod to Trojan law and custom.

Finally, Menelaus retrieves Helen. They travel to Egypt, where they are stranded for seven years, during which time they slowly grow into acceptance and forgiveness of each other. Finally, they return to Mycenae, where Helen learns about the death of her mother in her absence. Slowly, she reconnects with her daughter, Hermione, and she and Menelaus grow old together in a “shuffling, old-person’s peace—the peace that descends when all other concerns have either died or fled” – a mockery of the age of peace that Menelaus had complained about earlier.