Waterhouse chose to paint Circe not commanding monsters or transforming sailors into swine, her more familiar role in Homer's Odyssey, but at a smaller, more personal moment of jealousy from a different strand of her myth: poisoning the water where her rival Scylla bathed, out of resentment at being spurned by the sea god Glaucus in favour of the younger nymph. The choice of subject sidesteps the grand sorcery of the Odyssey for something closer to a domestic act of spite, rendered with the same seriousness Waterhouse gave his more heroic mythological subjects.

Circe was one of several mythological women Waterhouse painted more than once across his career, part of a broader interest, shared by many British painters of his generation, in female figures from Greek and Roman myth cast as alluring but destructive. Waterhouse trained and exhibited chiefly through the Royal Academy Schools in London, and rather than settling on a single recurring theme he moved between subjects drawn from Homer, Ovid, Arthurian legend and the poetry of Tennyson throughout his working life^[1][2]. His style itself shifted over that career, moving from an early Neoclassical manner learned in his training toward the more Pre-Raphaelite handling associated with painters of the movement's later, second generation, a group that also included Frederic Leighton, Marie Spartali Stillman and Evelyn De Morgan^[2].

Waterhouse's output includes several titles that echo one another in subject and mood: alongside Circe Invidiosa, he painted St Cecilia, Ophelia, The Lady of Shalott and La Belle Dame sans Merci, works that were popular enough in his own lifetime to be reproduced as photoengravings and sold to a wider public^[1]. This pattern, returning again and again to women drawn from myth, literature and legend who are either dangerous, doomed or both, runs through Waterhouse's career and places Circe Invidiosa firmly within his most consistent body of work rather than as an isolated subject.