Mail and Female

Ovi's Heroides are an illusion. They comprise the letters of fifteen women to the lovers who abandoned them yet the women, of course, are the personas of Ovid, a man. This interesting study, originally a thesis, draws on modern gender and psychoanalytic theory to explore what these poems, and the fifteen case studies in love and abandonment that they contain, reveal about women and what these female voices' reveal about male attitudes towards women. In particular Sara Lindheim discusses why Ovid should have selected these legends as his subject matter and why he chose the epistolary genre. The epistles themselves are discussed in detail with extracts in Latin and English while any notes are confined to the end.