Emily Hauser

Emily Hauser (born 1987 or 1988) is a British scholar of classics and a historical fiction novelist. She is a lecturer in classics and ancient history at the University of Exeter and has published three novels in her "Golden Apple" trilogy: For the Most Beautiful, For the Winner (2017) and For the Immortal (2018).

Early life and education Hauser was born in Brighton, United Kingdom and brought up in Suffolk.

Hauser studied classics at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where she was taught by Mary Beard, While at Yale, Hauser twice received the Alice Derby Lang Essay Prize awarded to students attaining "high scholarship" in classical literature or art.

In 2011, Hauser translated 's 2001 article "L'Intrigue de Zeus", published in French literary magazine Europe, from French to English for the Harvard University Center of Hellenic Studies.

Hauser's academic work focuses on authorship and gender in antiquity, women in Homeric epic and classical reception in contemporary women's writing.

Hauser's novels also reflect her focus on women's narratives and how these can expand contemporary understanding of classical stories by providing new perspectives.

Novels

Hauser's first novel, For the Most Beautiful, was published by Transworld (Penguin Random House) in 2016 and is the first in The Golden Apple Trilogy. It retells the story of the Trojan War from the perspective of Krisayis, daughter of the Trojans' High Priest, and Briseis, a princess of Pedasus enslaved after her husband is killed by the Greeks.

Hauser has expressed the importance of women's voices and narratives to her work in a 2016 interview with Ancient History Encyclopedia (AHE). In the interview, Hauser notes that the lack of female perspective in the Iliad often contributes to a dismissal of the tale as a mere war story focused on men.

One of Hauser's main motivations to write is to make the literature of antiquity accessible to those who have not yet encountered the classical world.

Selected publications

Non-fiction books Reading Poetry, Writing Genre: English Poetry and Literary Criticism in Dialogue with Classical Scholarship (2018), Oxford, London: Bloomsbury (edited, with Silvio Bär) How Women Became Poets: A Gender History of Greek Literature (2023), Princeton University Press. Penelope's Bones: A New History of Homer’s World through the Women Written Out of It (2025), Chicago University Press. Published in the UK under the title Mythica: A New History of Homer’s World, through the Women Written Out Of It.

Non-fiction book chapters ' : Homeric Scholarship and the Invention of Female Epic.' (2018) in Bär S, Hauser E (Eds.) Reading Poetry, Writing Genre: English Poetry and Literary Criticism in Dialogue with Classical Scholarship, London, Oxford: Bloomsbury, 151-171. 'Making Men: Gender and the Poet in Pindar' (2022), in Cordes L, Fuhrer T (Eds.) The Gendered ‘I’ in Ancient Literature: Modelling Gender in First-Person Discourse, De Gruyter, 129-149. 'Women in Homer and Beyond' (2024) in Greensmith, E. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Epic, Cambridge University Press, 274-294.

Novels The Golden Apple Trilogy, a series by Emily Hauser, consists of the following three novels: For the Most Beautiful (2016) London, Transworld For the Winner. (2017) London, Transworld For the Immortal (2018) London, Transworld

Journal articles 'Erica Jong’s Sappho’s Leap: (Re-)Constructing Gender and Authorship through Sappho' (in press), Synthesis, 12, 55-75. 'Putting an end to Song: Penelope, Odysseus and the Teleologies of the Odyssey.' (in press), Helios, 47(1), 39-69. 'When Classics Gets Creative: from Research to Practice.' (2019) Transactions of the American Philological Association, 149 (2), 163-177. There is another story': Writing after the Odyssey in Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad. (2017) Classical Receptions Journal, 10(2), 109-126. 'In Her Own Words: the Semantics of Female Authorship in Ancient Greece, from Sappho to Nossis.' (2016) Ramus, 45(2), 133-164. Optima tu proprii nominis auctor: the Semantics of Female Authorship in Ancient Rome, from Sulpicia to Proba.' (2016) Eugesta, 6, 151-186.