The Way to Colonos: Sophocles Retold

First published in 1961, The Way to Colonos refashions three seminal plays by Sophocles into tales of modern women, probing their characters with savage intimacy. Antigone, wheeling her father, Oedipus, onto the ferry to Colonos, is a stylish woman in her thirties, disgusted by her father’s self-absorption, guilt, and evasions. A suburban Electra dreams of a bloody confrontation with her mother, Clytemnestra, that may never come to pass. Philoctetes, a castaway soldier, navigates shifting allegiances in a guerrilla war that divided Greece after World War II.

As Rachel Cusk writes in her foreword to this new edition, the first in sixty years, Cicellis was a woman before her time, whose work—written in English, her second language—offers “shocking insight into the secret lives of young women” and is only now “free to reach readers with an appetite for female artistic authority, who wish to see the world through sharp fresh eyes.”

“Kay Cicellis will go very far.”

—Vita Sackville-West

“Cicellis . . .  looks at life steadily and as if for the first time, with profound watchfulness, as if nothing else mattered. That is her essential originality; she has her own vision of life . . . She is fascinated by certain kinds of experience, especially those in which the imagination seems to grow transparent, so that all things are reflected in it, and everything is in its place . . . Cicellis takes life from many sides, and is always sensitively conscious of the quality of the situation she describes. She has a style which catches the intimate nature of things and never stops at the surface. She is a remarkable writer.”

—Edwin Muir, The Observer

“One of the most refreshing and exciting of the world’s younger women novelists.”

—Linda Brandi, The New York Times

“Her style is simple . . . her narrative is well-knit, and her detail cleverly observed and selected.”

—David Tylden-Wright, Times Literary Supplement

“Cicellis writes of very modern things and people . . . but the excellence of her writing lies in the fact that it has a timeless quality, a continuity with antiquity, a colour and warmth that is Greek whatever the time.”

—Times Literary Supplement

“Cicellis . . . has a startling talent, and her fluent precision lends a kind of dignity to the characters she creates.”

—Marigold Johnson, Times Literary Supplement

“Kay Cicellis bridges the gap between Sophocles and UNRRA, between Electra and the minutiae of contemporary Greek middle-class life . . . a writer of intelligence who never throws away a word nor departs an inch from her high seriousness.”

—Kenneth Young, Daily Telegraph

“She is like Penelope at her web, shuttling the coloured threads to and fro, weaving into the pattern love and hate, laughter and death . . . infinitely subtle.”

—Peter Green, Daily Telegraph

“War and circumstance have made her an English writer of high intelligence and great perspicaciousness exactly expressed.”

—Martin Shuttleworth, The Listener

“An original.”

—Maurice Wiggin, Sunday Times

“The characters in these Greek stories burn in that enclosed air of people living, damned, within the rigid context of their emotions. Existence is an imposition which all recognise and none avoids.”

—David Storey, Sunday Times 

“She expresses the immediacy of human relations with an imaginative awareness which is intensely alive to the physically felt moment.”

—Hugh P. A Fausset

Kay Cicellis (1926-2001) was born to Greek parents in Marseilles, where she spent her first nine years. Having learned French and English in the nursery, she spent her later childhood in Athens and on her father’s native island of Cephalonia. Her first stories, smuggled out of Athens during the Nazi occupation, were published in the British military press when she was a teenager. Her first story collection, The Easy Way, appeared with an introduction by Vita Sackville-West in 1950. Apart from her “Greek Trilogy,” Cicellis published a second collection, Death of a Town, and two novels, Ten Seconds from Now and No Name in the Street. With her husband she opened a fashionable restaurant in Athens, Balthazar, and raised two children. Although she found it more difficult in later life to write in English, she continued to translate into both English and Greek.

Rachel Cusk is the author of Second Place, the Outline trilogy, the memoirs A Life’s Work and Aftermath, and several other works of fiction and nonfiction. She is a Guggenheim Fellow. She lives in Paris.

The Way to Colonos: Sophocles Retold • ISBN: 9781946022776

Dec 2, 2025 • $19.00 • McNALLY EDITIONS no. 47

Paperback with flaps • 5” x 8.5” • 192 pages

eBook ISBN: 9781946022783

5” x 8.5” • 192 pages

UK Pub: Jan 15, 2026 • UK Price: £12.99