In Homer’s Odyssey, Nausicaa is a tall, gutsy teenage princess who finds a naked and helpless Odysseus washed up on her shore, gives him her brothers’ clothing, and instructs him on how to appeal to her mother, Queen Arete, for help to get home to Ithaca. She is crucial to his eventual return home after 20 years’ absence.

But she doesn’t appear in Christopher Nolan’s film at all – and her absence is part of a broader debate about how his version reduces or simplifies the role of women in the epic poem. In the Guardian, classicist Emily Hauser mourned the absence of the “delightfully brash princess”, along with nuance and complexity.

“There are more female characters than in most Nolan movies, thanks to the source material,” wrote classics professor Emily Wilson, whose translation of The Odyssey is a critically acclaimed bestseller, this week. “But none of them has much to say, in contrast to the characterisations in the poem.”

This applies to several key characters, from the enchantress Circe, who turned Odysseus’ men into pigs, to Odysseus’ wife Penelope. But what about the absent Nausicaa? Who was she? And why was she important?

Nausicaa, Odysseus’ teenage saviour

Nausicaa lives on the island of Scheria, where she and her fellow Phaeacians, an isolated and peaceful people, rarely encounter strangers. The goddess Athena visits the teenager in a dream and encourages her to wash her dirty laundry. She tells her the best young men of Scheria want to court her, and that Nausicaa and her bridesmaids will need clean dresses.

When she awakes, Nausicaa asks her father, King Alcinous, to loan her a mule-wagon so she and her female slaves can take the laundry to the seaside to wash. She offers to........

© The Conversation