Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Sappho
-
Standard Name: Sappho
Birth Name: Sappho
Used Form: Sapho
Sappho
, the female poet who stands at the head of the lyric tradition in Europe, has been a major figure of identification, of desire, of influence, of adulation, and of opprobrium in British women's writing, though little remains of her texts. All of her estimated 12,000 lines of verse has been lost except a handful of complete poems and many fragments, either quotations of her work by other writers, or scraps deciphered from papyri used to wrap mummies in ancient Egypt. This mutilated body of work amounts to somewhere around seven hundred intelligible lines.
The poem in its later version, headed with a quotation from Virgil
, opens: Unequal, how shall I the search begin, / Or paint with artless hand the awful scene?
Concanen, Matthew, editor. The Flower-Piece. Walthoe.
There is a strong flavour of Kafka
about this comic parable both of a family and of a state. The royal family of Evarchia (somewhere in contemporary Middle or Eastern Europe) has an authoritarian father...
Textual Features
Barbarina Brand, Baroness Dacre
An epilogue by Thomas Moore
sounds flippantly critical of Bluestockings (not the historical group of this name, but in the more general sense of intellectual women). A speaker appears wondering much what little knavish sprite...
JB
makes a pretence that the main story, the on-again off-again love of Bosvil and Galesia, is related by Galesia, in the garden at St Germain in about 1688, to someone called Lucasia (a name...
Textual Features
Rosamund Marriott Watson
Her introduction demonstrates a good knowledge of ancient Greek poetry and its publication history. In addition to selections by Plato
and Theocritus
, the book includes single poems by Sappho
and Erinna
.
Watson, Rosamund Marriott, editor. Selections from the Greek Anthology. W. Scott.
xi-xii
Textual Features
Frances Burney
The Woman-Hater again features Lady Smatter. This time she drops nearly five times as many authors' names as in The Witlings; only one, Sappho
, is that of a woman.
MR
's preface quotes that of Charlotte Smith
to her Elegiac Sonnets.
Robinson, Mary. “Introduction”. Mary Robinson: Selected Poems, edited by Judith Pascoe, Broadview, pp. 19-64.
45
She presents her own work as one of scholarship, explaining that by legitimate in her title she means the sonnet in...
Textual Features
Jeanette Winterson
The novel's three apparently unconnected characters are breast surgeon Handel (erstwhile boy chorister, castrato, and Catholic priest; not the same as yet reminiscent of George Frederick Handel
), Picasso (a young woman whose family opposes...
Textual Production
Christina Rossetti
In Sappho, as also in another poem on the Greek lyricist written two years later, fifteen-year-old CR
signalled her interest in the female poetic tradition.
Rossetti, Christina. The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti. Editor Crump, Rebecca W., Louisiana State University Press.
3: 392, 423
Textual Production
Anne Carson
AC
's poetry collection Men in the Off Hours, 2000, variously inhabits the minds (and bodies) of Tolstoy
, Lazarus, Freud
, Catullus
, Sappho
and Emily Dickinson
, not to mention the French...
Textual Production
Anne Carson
AC
's translations from Greek manage to incorporate some of the quirkiness of her original texts and titles. She titled If Not, Winter. Fragments of Sappho, 2002, from a poetic scrap that leaves the...
Textual Production
Elizabeth Singer Rowe
Jane Turell
of Massachusetts (a generation younger than ESR
, the daughter of her old admirer Benjamin Colman
) emulated Rowe so single-mindedly that Melanie Bigold
feels she became a kind of American Rowe. She...
Textual Production
Sarah Lewis
The American Sarah Lewis
published her play Sappho
, A Tragedy in Five Acts (which was reviewed in England and France, as well as the United States).
