The Way to Colonos

A fiery modern retelling of three Greek tragedies, “written in an ageless prose that instantly strikes the reader as the work of a master.” (Rachel Cusk, from the foreword)
First published in 1961, The Way to Colonos recasts three seminal plays by Sophocles into tales of modern women and warfare, probing their characters with savage intimacy. Antigone—a stylish woman in her thirties—wheeling her father, Oedipus, onto the ferry to Colonos, is disgusted by his self-absorption, guilt, and evasions. A suburban Electra dreams of a bloody confrontation with her mother, Clytemnestra, that may never come to pass. Philoctetes, a castaway soldier, navigates shifting allegiances in a guerrilla war that divided Greece after World War II.
As Rachel Cusk writes in her foreword to this new edition, Cicellis was a woman before her time, whose work—written in English, her second language—offers particularly “shocking insight into the secret lives of young women” and is only now “free to reach readers with an appetite for female artistic authority, who wish to see the world through sharp fresh eyes.”

Kay Cicellis (1926–2001) was born to Greek parents in Marseilles, where she spent her first nine years. Having learned French and English in the nursery, she spent her later childhood in Athens and on her father’s native island of Cephalonia. Her first stories, smuggled out of Athens during the Nazi occupation, were published in the British military press when she was a teenager. Her first story collection, The Easy Way, appeared with an introduction by Vita Sackville-West in 1950. Apart from The Way to Colonos, Cicellis published a second story collection, Death of a Town, and two novels, Ten Seconds from Now and No Name in the Street. She spent her later life in Athens, where she and her husband raised two children and opened a restaurant, Balthazar, which remains in business half a century later.