A Greek chorus of the twelve maids, who Odysseus believed were disloyal and whom Telemachus hanged, interrupt Penelope's narrative to express their view on events.

The maids' interludes use a new genre each time, including a jump-rope rhyme, a lament, an idyll, a ballad, a lecture, a court trial and several types of songs.

The novella's central themes include the effects of story-telling perspectives, double standards between the sexes and the classes, and the fairness of justice.

The play was performed at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon and the National Arts Centre in Ottawa during the summer and fall of 2007 by an all-female cast led by director Josette Bushell-Mingo.

In January 2012, the show opened in Toronto at Nightwood Theatre, with an all-female cast led by director Kelly Thornton and starring Megan Follows as Penelope.

[2] Publisher Jamie Byng of Canongate Books solicited author Margaret Atwood to write a novella re-telling a classic myth of her choice.

[3] From her home in Toronto, the 64-year-old author made attempts at writing the Norse creation myth and a Native American story but struggled.

Atwood believed the roles of Penelope and her maids during Odysseus's absence had been a largely neglected scholarly topic and that she could help address it with this project.

She feared violence if she outright denied their offer of marriage so she announced she would make her decision on which to marry once she finished her father-in-law's shroud.

Penelope identifies Odysseus's specialty as making people look like fools and wonders why his stories have survived so long, despite being an admitted liar.

Structured similarly to a classical Greek drama, the storytelling alternates between Penelope's narrative and the choral commentary of the twelve maids.

Homer portrays Penelope as loyal, patient, and the ideal wife, as he contrasts her to Clytemnestra who killed Agamemnon upon his return from Troy.

[13][14] In The Penelopiad, Penelope feels compelled to tell her story because she is unsatisfied with Homer's portrayal of her and the other myths about her sleeping with the suitors and giving birth to Pan.

Using the maids' lecture on anthropology, Atwood satirizes Robert Graves' theory of a matriarchal lunar cult in Greek myth.

The lecture makes a series of connections, concluding that the rape and execution of the maids by men represent the overthrow of the matriarchal society in favor of patriarchy.

[19] Penelope's story is an attempt at narrative justice to retribute Helen for her erroneously idealised image in the Odyssey as the archetypal female.

The ancient form of justice and punishment, which was swift and simple due to the lack of courts, prisons, and currency, is tempered by more modern concepts of balanced distributions of social benefits and burdens.

Penelope's chosen form of punishment for Helen is to correct the historical records with her own bias by portraying her as vain and superficial,[12] as someone who measures her worth by the number of men who died fighting for her.

The maids do not have the same sanctioned voice as Penelope and are relegated to unauthoritative genres, though their persistence eventually leads to more valued cultural forms.

According to this literary theory, contemporary works are not independent but are part of an underlying pattern that re-invents and adapts a finite number of timeless concepts and structures of meaning.

[20] Graves, an adherent to Samuel Butler's theory that the Odyssey was written by a woman, also wrote The White Goddess, which formed the basis of the Maid's anthropology lecture.

In Hope's 1960s poem "The End of the Journey" Penelope and Odysseus pass an unhappy night after the slaughter of the suitors and the maids, and wake to a scene of horror: "Each with her broken neck, each with a blank,/Small strangled face, the dead girls in a row /Swung as the cold airs moved them to and fro".

She wrote a short story in Ovid Metamorphosed called The Elysium Lifestyle Mansions re-telling a myth with Apollo and the immortal prophet the Sibyl from the perspective of the latter living in the modern age.

[34] Some reviewers like Christopher Tayler and David Flusfeder, both writing for The Daily Telegraph, praised the book as "enjoyable [and] intelligent"[35] with "Atwood at her finest".

[16] Specifically, the scenes with the chorus of maidservants are said to be "mere outlines of characters"[40] with Elizabeth Hand writing in The Washington Post that they have "the air of a failed Monty Python sketch".

[15] In the journal English Studies, Odin Dekkers and L. R. Leavis described the book as "a piece of deliberate self-indulgence" that reads like "over-the-top W. S. Gilbert", comparing it to Wendy Cope's limericks reducing T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land to five lines.

[41] Following a successful dramatic reading directed by Phyllida Lloyd at St James's Church, Piccadilly on 26 October 2005, Atwood finished a draft theatrical script.

[43][44] An all-female cast was selected consisting of seven Canadian and six British actors, with Josette Bushell-Mingo directing and Veronica Tennant as the choreographer.

[46][47] Adjustments made between productions resulted in the Canadian performance having emotional depth that was lacking in Bushell-Mingo's direction of the twelve maids.