Galatea by Madeline Miller

Pygmalion, the skilled marble sculptor, is blessed by a goddess who has given the gift of life to his stone masterpiece, the most beautiful women the town has ever seen. In tension with his expectation to be obedient and subservient, she has her own desires and yearns for independence. Locked away and under constant supervision, Galatea is determined to break free and rescue her daughter.

Galatea, by Miller’s own admission in the story's new afterword, is a response almost exclusively to Ovid’s version of the Pygmalion myth in Metamorphoses. Pivoting the focus from the physique of his creation, the metaphors of artists falling in love with their art, Miller instead subverts the notable thread that “the only good woman is one who has no self beyond pleasing a man”. In Ovid’s version, she does not speak; she is not even named; she serves a simple purpose.

And so, Galatea becomes a little jewel that centres the formerly nameless woman given life by a goddess, not only giving her voice, but a complexity and boldness – an agency – she was previously denied. She is in conflict: with her husband, the doctors and nurses who surround her, indeed the world itself who cannot understand her, or simply choose not to.

This pocket-sized short story is an offering – for those who long for more from Madeline Miller following The Song of Achilles and Circe – that satisfies an itch in its succinct fifty pages. It makes Galatea brim with life, through her optimism to escape, frustration at not being understood, and her conviction that she can get what she wants, no matter the cost. Deft and satisfying, it’s a welcome – albeit fleeting – return to the worlds Miller brings alive.