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

After receiving her MA in English, she became an instructor of literature and composition at Santa Barbara City College, including an annual course, ‘World Literature: Homer to Dante’. When her children went off to college, Jinny returned to UCSB to earn a PhD in Religious Studies. Her focus on myth and literature  inspired her to undertake a novel exploring the puzzling myth of Teiresias. 

Ancient resonances filled her imagination on her many subsequent trips to Greek islands, museums, and archeological sites, as did Mother Goddess studies and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In Ovid’s collection of myths she first read the story of Teiresias, a brief and enigmatic tale of his gender changes and summons by the gods. 

So she fictionalized this myth, filling in gaps in Ovid’s account, especially what happened during the seven years as a woman. Greek tragedies give various versions of Teiresias as the blind soothsayer in the Thebes of Oedipus and his descendants which she incorporated into the second part. Writing residencies at Cyprus College of Art in Lemba, a village above Paphos, where Aphrodite arose from the sea and on Evia island immersed her in the Greek atmosphere and mythos. The resulting novel, Serpent Visions will be released in June, 2025. 

Jinny’s three Shakespeare-era novels, The Secret Player, Dark Venus, and Bedtrick have a very different gender theme. They follow the career of Alexander Cooke, an historical actor in Shakespeare’s company, who in Jinny’s version was born female. After the publisher of the first two died (they’re available in revised versions on Amazon), Cuidono Press released Bedtrick in November, 2021, designed to stand alone. For more information, see Cuidono Press and Jinny’s earlier blog posts on sex and gender in Shakespeare’s England.