“No doubt I will eventually fade away and be lost in oblivion…” - Lavinia

Ursula Le Guin’s beautifully-spun tale of the arrival of the defeated Trojans to the settlements of the Latins before the Roman Republic’s hazy dawn comes to us through the eyes of Lavina, a young woman brought to life more than two millennia ago by Vergil.

Ms. Le Guin makes clever work of Vergil’s epic poem, The Aeneid, breathing life into the almost non-existent character of Lavinia, daughter of the king of the Latins, who becomes the third and final wife of Aeneas, cousin of Hector and refugee of a fallen Troy.

Known in the poem only for her blush, and almost nothing else, Ms Le Guin crafts a credible story of the woman who was to become (according to Vergil) the mother of the line of kings that led to Augustus. The mother of the Roman Empire.

And yet, all she is granted in almost ten thousand lines are a scant few:

And it was read by seers to mean the girl

Would have renown and glorious days to come,

But that she brought a great war on her people

From these small crumbs, Lavinia is brought to life by the author’s pen into a thinking, feeling, decisive woman who is both the dutiful daughter of her father’s Regia, and a woman who refuses to submit to the will of men who intend to use her as a pawn in their political games. 

No man may crush her under their sandal, be they king, son of a king, or even the poet who takes it upon himself to cross the boundary of time and visit her as he lays upon the threshold of his own death more than a thousand years later. 

Their meetings are brief and in them, Lavinia learns who Vergil is, of the magnificent city to come - and what she is - a work of fiction- an astonishing thing to craft into a tale, yet there it is, in all its poignant beauty.

Filled with regret for not giving her more of a place in his poem, Vergil tries to remedy things by confessing his failure. He tells her of all that is to come for her. Of Troy, where her noble soon-to-be husband sails from after years wandering in search of his destined home; of the queen, Dido, who impaled her heart with a sword when Aeneas left her alone in Carthage to fulfil the prophecy given to him by his dead Trojan wife.

And Vergil tells Lavinia of the war Aeneas’s arrival will cause, of the multitude of lives that will end, and of her part in it.

All these events we experience through her eyes and suffer with her, until, in an abrupt moment, the poem ends.

And after a quiet pause, Lavinia’s story carries on.

Within this part of the tale, we are treated to the clean simplicity of Lavinia’s expectations, of her ability to love with all her heart - while bearing the burden of knowing how brief her marriage to her beloved husband would be.

We are carried along the channel of her life as it goes from stage to stage until at last, we expect her to die of old age, but no, again we are in for another breathtaking treat.

In Lavinia, Ms Le Guin’s final novel of her career, we are left with a sense of forever. And somehow, it’s both a homage to Vergil, and to all those characters authors create and leave behind.

And when you know these are the final words of her final novel, it’s beautiful enough to make you cry.