Dear PhD Thesis... (I submitted my PhD and then wrote it a letter)

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Dear PhD Thesis, 

Or, to give you your full name, dear Contemporary Feminist Adaptations of Greek Myth, 


So, here we are, at the finish line. Kind of. I handed you in! Can you even believe it? It’s making me reflect on our time together. 



Our journey began when I started the PhD in September 2018. Back then, your name was Feminist Rewritings of Myth in the Canongate Myth Series, and the goal was to analyse the female-authored texts in the Canongate Myth Series, taking a cross-mythological approach to look at how the authors adapted Greco-Roman, Norse, and Japanese myth to speak to contemporary feminist concerns. 


Very quickly, it became apparent that I knew nothing about studying myths or adaptation theories, and that was… a problem. So, I set to and taught myself Classics. No biggie. 


Another doubt was wriggling into my brain. There was no way I could also teach myself everything I’d need to know about studying Norse and Japanese myth, especially while trying to avoid that colonialist, white-supremacist, western-centric problem in comparative mythology, where “Other” myth systems are assessed and valued by how (dis)similar they are to Greco-Roman myths. 


And then along came the interlopers. I read Circe and The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller and The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker. I just knew I had to write on them. They needed to be in my thesis. At first, I thought “maybe I’ll bring them in briefly to compare”, but I knew that these texts had changed the game of women’s mythic adaptations, and so my thesis must change along with it. 


So, by April 2019, you, dear Thesis, had changed. You became Contemporary Feminist Adaptations of Greek Myth. 


This was an interesting shift, because in some ways my research had become much broader – I was looking beyond the Canongate Myth Series – but in other ways it became much more focused, since I was looking specifically at adaptations of Greek myth. 


In May 2019, I wrote a blog post explaining this shift in my research. It’s interesting because I really hit the nail on the head with it when I acknowledged that, from the outside, the thesis title probably didn’t seem so different, but in actuality, it was back to the drawing board in a lot of ways. 


So, we got a re-start, you and I.


That blog post lists the primary texts in my thesis as they stood then, ending with Shamsie’s Home Fire (2017),  Barker’s The Silence of the Girls (2018), and Madeline Miller’s Circe (2018). 


Of course, in the middle of 2019, I had no idea that the actual scope of my thesis would become women’s adaptations of Greek myth beginning with the publication of Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad in 2005 and ending with novels published in 2021, including Barker’s sequel to The Silence of the Girls, The Women of Troy (2021), along with Claire Heywood’s Daughters of Sparta (2021) and Jennifer Saint’s Ariadne (2021). 


I know I am literally writing you a love letter right now, but I’m not going to pretend that it was always easy: there was a global pandemic, personal life upheavals (including more home moves than I care to count), a #MeToo movement, about a million part-time jobs, and the added issues of being both incredibly poor and completely unfunded. 


There was also the ever-present imposter syndrome. How could I, a working class girl from a comprehensive school in the midlands, who was a non-attender at school until she sat her GCSEs, and who has never studied Classics, think I was qualified to do a PhD, let alone one in English Literature at a top university? 


When you try to talk about imposter syndrome, all you hear is that everyone has it. That is reassuring at first, it normalises it, to hear that you’re going through something that everyone else does. But the one hundredth time you hear it, it becomes less helpful. I thought, “Okay, I understand that this is supposedly normal, and that everyone gets it, but I am currently getting it, so maybe I could get some reassurance that I am good enough to be here?”. I also thought, “Wait, everyone feels this insecure in academia? There is something systemically wrong here.” and I was right. But that’s an outrage for another time. 


Nevertheless, I had an absolute ball researching and writing you, dear Thesis. I’ve wanted to do a PhD ever since I learned what one was, and I was fortunate enough not only to get to do one, but to do it on a topic that I never got sick of. There are so many people who undertake big projects like this, and by the end of it they can’t stand the subject –– which is completely understandable, and it’s one reason why some people choose not to research the things that they're a fan of. My interest in the topic of contemporary women’s myth writing, though, has only grown throughout the PhD journey, and I really hope I get the opportunity to continue researching it in the future. 


Since handing you in, I have done very little, and it’s been glorious. I’ve been learning anew how to relax, spending most of my time in a onesie playing Stardew Valley on my Switch. It’s been great, and I’m very lucky that I had a chance to unwind and take a break after achieving such a big hurdle that I’ve been working towards for so long. 


That being said, now I’ve got marking to get on with, and then I might finally have to ask myself that question that all postgraduate researchers hate, “what’s next?”. 


Forever yours,

Shelby. 


Cover image: 'Athena with Penelope Weaving' by Philipp Veit (1833-36)  

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