Pat Barker on The Silence of the Girls: ‘The Iliad is myth – the rules for writing historical fiction don’t apply’ | How I wrote | The Guardian

I think this passage was the one that finally persuaded me to read the Iliad. I'd always put it off because I thought I'd be bored by the endless lists of shipping and repelled by Homer's graphic descriptions of wounds and killing; and I was right on both counts, but the poetry, the characters and the conflict more than made up for that.

The poem opens with the quarrel. Both men make long, impassioned speeches that descend into jibes and insults, though physical violence is narrowly averted. Great speeches - and yet what I took away from my first reading was silence, because the girls whose fates are being decided say not a word. I knew I was going to have to write about it one day: about the experience of those silenced girls.