Ever since spending a year on a Fulbright teaching grant on the island of Cyprus, Aphrodite’s birthplace, Jinny Webber has been enticed by the Greek mythic world. That fascination had begun earlier, reading her mother’s copy of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology and Mary Renault’s The King Must Die and studying Homer and Greek plays at University of California, Santa Barbara. 

After receiving her MA in English there, she became an instructor of literature and composition at Santa Barbara City College, including an annual course in World Literature: Homer to Dante. When her children went off to college, she returned to UCSB to earn a PhD in Religious Studies, focus on myth and literature. 

Ancient resonances filled her imagination on her many subsequent trips to Greek islands, museums, and archeological sites, as did the Mother Goddess studies that emerged in the 1970’s and 80’s. Tales from Ovid’s Metamorphoses added to her fascination, and she’s collected a shelf full of translations and spinoffs from Ovid. 

Always a writer (Jinny has published three novels set in Shakespeare’s England), she wrote her own fictional spinoff over the years, filling in gaps in one of Ovid’s stories, augmented by Greek plays. After two writing retreats, those bits and pieces came to together in a two-part novel. The first retreat, in 2018, was at the Cyprus College of Art in Lemba, a village above Paphos where Aphrodite arose from the sea foam, and the second, in 2021, on Evia island off the east coast of Greece.

That novel, working title Serpent Vision, will be out soon: publication details to follow. Jinny’s published stories based on mythology include ‘Jocasta Speaks,’ Greek Myths Revisited, and ‘Becoming a Priestess of Aphrodite, Blood and Roses.

Her three Shakespeare-era novels are The Secret Player, Dark Venus, and Bedtrick. These were conceived as a trilogy following the career of Alexander Cooke, an historical actor in Shakespeare’s company, who in this version was born female. After the publisher of the first two died, Cuidono Press released Bedtrick to stand alone. For more information, see www.cuidonopress/bedtrick, and Jinny’s previous blog, ‘Sex and Gender in Shakespeare’s England.’

For now, however, the focus is on ancient Greece.