Ursula Le Guin's 2008 novel Lavinia presents a unique case study with which to examine the ways in which feminist readership and the classical canon can be theorised, and this thesis will be the first full-length examination to concentrate on her text. To do this, I will be establishing the character of Lavinia in Lavinia as an ideal feminist reader of Virgil' s Aeneid, and exploring how her interactions with specific sites or moments of inteltext, including her conversations with the ghost of the dying Virgil, show Lavinia (and Le Guin) to be a privileged and insightful reader of Virgil's canonical text. By looking at specifically Le Guinian metaphors for feminist writing and reading, alongside their interplay with second wave feminist metaphors for the same, I will begin to construct a theory of feminist readership in Lavinia that is co-poietic and creative, informed by an engagement with Bracha Ettinger's theory of the matrixial borderspace. This theory will then be utilised in a study of Lavinia's most ovelt sites of feminist engagement with Virgil's Aeneid. Featured in this research will also be a communication with Rachel Blau DuPlessis' work in For the Etruscans as a notable founding work of feminist reader response theory that utilises a silenced and marginalised female character from the Aeneid. An examination of Lavinia 's paratexts will also help to explore the ways in which the external reader of Lavinia is encouraged to engage co-poietically with this work of feminist classical reception. By looking at the elements of Lavinia 's paratexts that communicate with particular competencies of female and feminist reader, we will see how the reader, even with little or no previous experience of the Aeneid, is able to immediately immerse herself in the world of Virgil's Latium through the medium of Le Guin's Lavinia. This focus on Lavinia 's paratexts as effective sites of feminist reader response is a new approach that seeks to expand the field, and to instigate fulther exploration of paratext in feminist classical reception.