In Harold Bloom’s introduction to David Rosenberg’s translation of The Book of J, he floats the notion that it was a woman who authored this ancient portion of the Torah.
Today I read Samuel Butler’s thesis in his 1897 treatise, The Authoress of the Odyssey, in which he develops the idea that “Homer” did not compose The Odyssey, but a Sicilian woman did.
Comparing the two theses, Butler’s seems the more likely. Butler has more to work with. His arguments are a bit stronger.
Neither idea is all that important, I admit, though both spark interest, a very human interest in the authorship questions. Which Butler directly addresses early on in his book:
While I deny that art is only as interesting as its revelation of an artist — deny quite strongly — I nevertheless understand Butler’s scratching of an ancient phantom limb.
I am now going to have to read Butler’s translation of the Odyssey. But once I have set my mind to that, reading his prose Iliad seems a pre-requisite, no? Alas, I tend not to read long fiction, any more — I call it my “Bleak House Rule”: no long novels until I have read Bleak House, and since I haven’t yet read the Dickens masterpiece. . . well, you get the idea. So my new project seems a bit daunting. And doubly so, since the first few pages of Fagles’s poetic translation of the first Homeric epic strikes me as far more entertaining than Butler’s rendition in prose. Well, I would become neither the first nor last reader (or writer) to kick himself.
According to Samuel Butler — whose Erewhon is a strange sort of masterpiece of science fiction, a sort of comedy of ideas (I wrote a foreword to an ebook reprint edition) — it is Homer’s Iliad and Nausicaa’s Odyssey. The sheer bravado of the thesis reminds me of other great revisionisms, such as Freud’s outrageous reinterpretation of Moses or Julian Jaynes’s speculative history of the “breakdown of the bicameral mind.”
This could be fun.
twv
Wirkman Comment 
The case for a female J seems very reasonable; that for a female author of The Odyssey seems especially strong.
Richard Elliott Friedman, whose version of the J text I have, suggested a female author before Bloom did; Friedman was (and probably still is) annoyed that Bloom did not acknowledge as much.
Meanwhile, Jaynes seems to have written as if without a familiarity with the higher criticism of the Judeo-Christian scriptures; with no encounter with the idea that the Illad and Odyssey were written by authors of different sexes; and with much stronger cultural bias than he realized. Later parts of his book are largely tail-chasing, as he tests his theory against itself without acknowledging (and perhaps without realizing) that he is doing no more than that.
I haven’t read the Jaynes book since it first came out. I was deeply impressed with his discussions of consciousness in the first part of the book, while I regarded the historical theory as a nutty thesis almost to the extreme of Velikovsky — and I’m not referring to the excellent nut book “Oedipus and Akhenaten.” Freud’s “Moses and Monotheism” is also a nut book, even more enjoyable.
There is something about Akhenaten that brings out the nutty theories. There was a daring book about Akhenaten and Abraham by a Muslim scholar about 20 years ago. It, too, was fascinating, and probably nutso as well.
I confess, I also appreciate Jaynes’s long title. How very retro! (I like Ortega y Gassett’s “The Idea of Principle in Leibniz and in the Evolution of Deductive Theory.” Too bad the non-fiction book industry is dominated by Malcolm Gladwell’s modus. I would love to see a long-titled bestseller.)
I was unaware of Friedman’s J-as-woman priority. Interesting. Bloom was desperate for money, I understand.
I am now willing to consider a variant of the Marlovian theory (Butler was unduly censoriousmand defensive re “Shakspeare”): the “Bard” as Kit Marlowe with a sex change.
I’ve a few books by the aforementioned Ahmed Osman. I’ve not done more than to skim through any of them, but he seems to plow ahead, willy-nilly. One of his more astonishing claims is that the historical Jesus, Moses’s successor Joshua, and Tutankhamun were the same person. I suspect that a respectable theory could be rescued from a terribly cracked pot, not literally equating various persons, but identifying parallels as deliberate echoes.