Sappho’s Shadow: Reading Ovid’s Heroides 15 as Reconstruction

Reading Ovid’s Heroides 15 as Reconstruction
By Clare Kearns

Ovid’s Heroides are fundamentally paradoxical. As a collection of letters that take on the point of view of spurned mythological heroines writing to their former lovers, the poems purport to express the sadness, fear, and anger felt by the heroines from their own perspective—though, of course, the Heroides is the work of male poet Ovid…