To better understand Cassandra and her role in the House of Atreus, you can read Agamemnon, the first play in The Oresteia by Aeschylus. The play details Cassandra's sight into the future of her own death at the hands of Clytemnestra, Agamemnon's jealous and vengeful wife (let it be known that Agamemnon stole Cassandra to be his mistress. I go more into depth on this situation here on my blog tab).
Giving Cassandra a Voice
Cassandra was published in 1983 by German author Christa Wolf. Although several of her books are fiction, many of them explore her own personal views on politics, society, war, the patriarchy, and other controversial topics. Today we see these topics as headache-inducing and endlessly disputable; imagine the uproar that the discussion of these topics caused in the decades in which Wolf lived, especially in the freshly divided Germany. Wolf was born in present day Poland, but then lived in East Germany for most of her life. She defected to West Germany for some time before going back to East Germany, claiming that there was nothing to write about and no one to write for in West Germany. In 1993, it was revealed that Wolf had worked for the Stasi and reported on fellow authors from the late 1950s to the early 1960s.
Through Cassandra, Wolf not only gives the mythological figure a voice and story of her own, but gives herself a voice as well. While Cassandra is briefly mentioned in Agamemnon and pushed aside as a crazy prophet, Wolf delves into her personality and fate through the plot of the novel. However, Cassandra is much more than a rewriting of myth. It is a social commentary on women's and men's writings, the meaning and necessity of war, and the treatment of women. Wolf isn't just writing about Cassandra, she's writing about herself as well. Despite the events of the novel and play occurring thousands of years ago, Wolf neatly ties the resounding issues back to her lifetime, today, and many years from now. She turns the mirror back to society and says, "We have never changed!".