This short story from The Song of Achilles author Madeline Miller is a powerful reimagining of Ovid’s Pygmalion, in which a sculptor falls in love with a woman he has carved out of ivory and who is, as Miller tells it, literature’s first “incel”. First published in 2013, Miller’s story opens with Galatea – the name means “she who is milk-white” – under the care of a medic who frets about her pale complexion. “I’m always this colour,” explains Galatea, “because I used to be made of stone.”
Gradually, we learn Galatea’s story: how, 10 years earlier, her husband (who remains deliberately nameless) had prayed to the goddess night after night to bring his sculpture of a perfect, naked woman to life. On touching her arm one day, he realised she was warm and that his prayers had been answered. Only soon he became frustrated as he realised his creation had a mind and a will of her own – “I don’t think he expected me to speak,” Galatea reflects – and resolved to keep her locked away under medical supervision. After Galatea becomes pregnant with their child, Paphos, her husband notices stretch marks on her belly and is enraged. “If you were stone, I would chisel them off,” he says.
The Luther actor Ruth Wilson is the narrator, elevating Miller’s luminous prose and conveying Galatea’s disgust at her husband’s physical demands and her realisation that, to be free, she must draw on her own considerable strength. When she finally gets her revenge on her captor, it is fierce and thrilling.
• Galatea by Madeline Miller is available from Bloomsbury, 46min
Further listening
Ultra-Processed People
Chris van Tulleken, Penguin Audio, 11hr 35min
The doctor and TV presenter reveals how substances in mass-produced food conspire to make us buy and eat more, and fuel tooth decay and obesity.
The Romantic
William Boyd, Penguin Audio, 17hr 21min
Kobna Holdbrook-Smith narrates the Scottish novelist’s fictionalised biography of a 19th-century Irish traveller.
• This article was amended on 16 July 2023. A previous version incorrectly referred to Ruth Wilson as “the Sherlock actor”.
