Jane Alison

Jane Alison’s fascination with Ovid was apparent with the publication of her first book, The Love Artist—a vivid portrayal of Ovid’s exile and the woman who bewitched him. Alison’s lifelong engagement with Ovid has seen a recent translation of selected extracts from the Amores and the Metamorphoses, especially. Like Pollard, Alison employs turns of phrase that bring Ovid directly into the contemporary world and remind us of how powerfully he has spoken of the pleasures, hurts, and anxieties that have been a part of female experience from generation to generation. Furthermore, by looking back from these translations to Alison’s memoir of a troubled childhood, we can see how Ovid helped her to structure her understanding of her chaotic and destabilized background.