Animating Athens: Frances Wright and Lydia Maria Child’s Hellenic Haunts

During an early nineteenth-century Hellenic revival characterized by interest in marginalized ancient Greek peoples and places, two prominent Anglo-American women each wrote a short, metaphysical fiction centered around life in ancient Athens. Scottish-born future U.S. émigré Frances “Fanny” Wright penned A Few Days in Athens (1822), and New Englander Lydia Maria Child wrote Philothea: A Grecian Romance (1836).² Using conventions of modern prose fiction such as lyrical settings, probable characters, and scenes of education, Wright and Child animated similar ancient Greek built and natural environments and figures while conveying the benefit of different schools of what we now call philosophy