Galatea: The instant Sunday Times bestseller

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Locked away and under constant supervision, Galatea is determined to break free and rescue her daughter. People began to talk about the sculptor’s wife, and how strange she was, and how such beauty comes only from the gods.

You see, what kind of man creates the perfect woman out of marble, obsessed with purity and perfection because real-life women have shunted or betrayed him (according to his statement, we never meet them)? Miller’s approach to the story by placing us in the mind of Galatea makes her existence less romanticized by showing how concepts of ownership and expectations of beauty are stifling to her.The comments are a Greek chorus of “my shampoobottles [sic] label has more text on it” and “What is this? I loved the authors note at the end which explained her inspiration from Pygmalion - a story referred to by Ovid in his Metamorphoses. Where We Might Go Next, Jeanette Winterson compares the idea of Galatea to the modern sex-dolls and the rather unsettling advances to make them more lifelike with modern computer tech, writing that ‘ doll-world reinforces the gender at its most oppressive and unimaginative,’ normalizing the idea of compliant sexual ‘partners’ ‘ made to look like the male-gaze stereotype’ with no sense of identity beyond pleasing, able to take endless abuse without complaining, and never having an independent thought.

First published in 2013, then included in xo Orpheus: Fifty New Myths it is now receiving a stand-alone 2022 publication as a gorgeous little hardback volume. I really wish this story had been longer as I think it would have made an excellent book, as a short story I just didn’t feel like it had enough in it to really get me absorbed into the book like I have been with Miller’s full length books.Reading Galatea has made me even more excited to find out more about Persephone (here’s what we know about Madeline Miller’s next book).