Penelope
3 of the 7 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Penelope. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
1000 Classical Characters (1900)
A celebrated princess of Greece, daughter of Icarius, and wife of Ulysses , king of Ithaca. She became the mother of Telemachus , and was obliged to part, with great reluctance, from her husband, when the Greeks compelled him to go to the Trojan war. The strife between the hostile forces continued for ten years, and when Ulysses did not return home at the conclusion of the war her fears and anxieties became overwhelming. She was beset by a number of suitors, who told her that her husband would never return. She received their advances with coldness, but as she was devoid of power, and, as it were, almost a prisoner in their hands, she temporized with them. After twenty years' absence Ulysses returned, and at once delivered her from the persecutions of her suitors. Penelope is described by Homer as a model of female propriety, whilst some more modern writers dispute the correctness of this view. The accounts given by different authors respecting her, in fact, differ materially. By some she is said to have been the mother of Pan.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
pe-nel'o-pe, in Greek legend, the wife of Ulysses and mother of Telemachus, who was but an infant when his father left home for Troy. During the ten years' siege and the years that followed before Ulysses reached home again, Penelope, who was a beautiful woman, had many suitors. They tried to persuade her that her husband was dead. She promised to choose a husband as soon as she had finished the weaving of a web to be used for the funeral canopy of Laertes, her husband's father. She worked at the web each day, but at night unraveled all she had woven. Thus Penelope's web has become proverbial as a thing constantly in process of construction, but never completed. See Ulysses
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a princess, daughter of Icarius, wife of Ulysses (Odysseus), and mother of Telemachus. According to the Homeric legend, Ulysses, during his long wanderings after the fall of Troy, was generally regarded as dead, and Penelope was vexed by the urgent ent suits of many lovers, whom she put off on the pretext that she must first weave a shroud for Laertes, her aged father-in-law. To protract the time, she undid by night the portion of the web which she had woven by day. When the suitors had discovered this device, her position became more difficult than before; but fortunately Ulysses returned in time to rescue his chaste spouse from their distasteful importunities.