Ariadne: the Maiden and the Minotaur.

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It is a strange thing talking about the inspiration for a novel. In some ways it feels like I am tempting fate by looking too closely at my Muse – I'm a little scared I may scare her away or make her angry if I talk about 'where it all began' too much.

Superstitions aside I can clearly remember sitting in overheated Lecture Theatre D at Melbourne University – feeling sleepy after a lunch at the local pub with fellow Classics devotees.

The lecture was on mythology and I can remember being told the story of Theseus, the fabulous Greek hero who comes to Crete and kills the Minotaur. But he wouldn't have been able to complete his task without the help of the King of Crete's daughter, the princess Ariadne. She told the hero to roll out a ball of twine behind him so, after all the killing, he could find his way out again. He in turn promised to marry her. On emerging from the labyrinth victorious he whisked Ariadne away on his ship – and took her beautiful sister, Phaedra, along for the ride. At the first island he promptly dumps Ariadne and takes off with Phaedra. Ariadne is left sobbing on the beach and some say Dionysos took pity on her and married her.

Now this made me sit up in my seat. "Typical Greek hero," I thought "All ready with the slashing and saving and killing but needs a woman to remind him how to get out of the mess he landed himself in. And Ariadne’s thanks? To be left and for history to remember her as the archetypal dumped girlfriend. Hardly fair." Well the lecture ended and the years rolled by with a career in journalism and two sons when a chance comment by my husband 'why don’t you write that book' – triggered that long ago memory.

And I was away. It seemed somewhere deep in my psyche I had indeed been writing that book because it came out onto the page in three months. Then the rewriting began, and continued, and kept on until I had something that resembled a novel. I think this is what makes a successful writer. The ability to keep working and working on the manuscript until it can hold its own. I was helped enormously by Virginia Lowe with this process and her Classicist husband, John.

Teachers' notes for Ariadne.

Persephone: Secrets of a Teenage Goddess.

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I began thinking about Persephone even while I was writing Ariadne. I was fascinated by how little was written about this daughter of the earth goddess, Demeter. It was almost as if she was nothing more than an extension of her mother – a creature of little significance and hardly worth a second glance. Until I saw a carving of Persephone sitting on a throne next to her husband, Hades, the king of the underworld. There she was, in all her splendour, handing out wheat and ruling over the dead. Hardly looking like the poor little girl who had been kidnapped by her uncle because she was silly enough to pick an enchanted flower.

Perhaps there was more to this young goddess than just being a convenient way for the Ancient Greeks to divide the seasons. Her myth explains that once she was stolen by Hades her mother, Demeter, was so furious that she refused to let the crops ripen. This maternal rage and cold revenge fascinated me – but not as much as why Persephone went to the underworld in the first place. I just didn't believe that the daughter of the earth goddess could be so stupid as to fall for the tricks of Hades. So I began toying with the notion that she chose him. This fitted much better with the rest of her myth that she married Hades and ruled with him happily in the underworld for six months of the year. It also seemed that Persephone was steeped heavily in ancient ritual – the Elusinian mysteries – a religion that sustained the Greeks for two thousand years.

We know almost nothing of it because it was passed down orally and in secret from one priestess to another. But the fact that Persephone was called Kore (the Ancient Greek word for 'girl') when she was 'above ground' and Persephone was a name only to be spoken in ritual – got my attention. As did the comment from my former Classics tutor, Chris Mackie, that some scholars believed that the pomegranate seeds Persephone ate that bound her to the underworld were a metaphor for semen. Icky, but interesting.

And once again, an ancient story had me following my own trail deep into murky mythical depths.