Ursula Le Guin openly mourns the early demise of the Latin language. "During the last century, the teaching and learning of Latin began to wither away into a scholarly specialty," she writes. Le Guin mourns the now all-but-certain passing of the Latin poet Virgil: "This is an awful pity, because he is one of the great poets of the world." Virgil’s best-known work is the Aeneid, which was once taught in schools in its original Latin alongside Homer’s Greek epics, "The Odyssey" and "The Iliad."

Le Guin’s recent novel, Lavinia, is based on Virgil’s epic but subtly written in a contemporary style. Lavinia was Aeneas’ wife who only played a small, non-speaking role in the epic but Le Guin has built up her role and created something truly original. Ursula Le Guin has completely omitted the gods and monsters in her story. Lavinia angers her mother, Amata, who desires that she marry Turnus, a coarse king. The slaughter of an untouchable stag sets off a hideous cycle of conflict between the Trojan and Latins that sees Aeneas eventually kills his adversary, but in such a way that he is haunted evermore.

Le Guin is an ingenious writer, clever with characters and as always; she drops gems of wisdom, infused with her pacifist, feminist and Taoist beliefs, all along the way.

Ursula Le Guin biography, bibliography and book reviews