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.
ES
loved Christina Rossetti
from her childhood, and later thoroughly admired Gertrude Stein
. As a young woman, however, she believed: Women's poetry, with the exception of Sappho
. . . and Goblin MarketChristina Rossetti
and...
Textual Production
Alexander Pope
His early translation Sapho
to Phaon—which, like Ovid
's original, represents the woman poet as despairingly in love with a man who has rejected her—appeared in print in 1712 in the eighth edition of...
Textual Production
Stevie Smith
Someone suggested that SS
should translate Sappho
, but she responded that I can't make head nor tail of that ancient girl.
Smith, Stevie. Me Again. Editors Barbera, Jack and William McBrien, Vintage.
She did not adopt, however, her father's concept of Sappho. She says that she will defend Sappho's reputation against her detractors, and does so by a version of the great poet which is quite different...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Mary Ann Browne
In 1840 MAB
published in three of the Dublin University Magazine's monthly issues. Her Sketches from the Antique—Second Series (in September) centres on women in antiquity. The Victor Virgin describes girl athletes racing; although...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Mary Ann Browne
Sappho
at the Loom again uses the ancient poet as a way of writing about the balance, for a woman, of poetry with more conventional female attributes: 'Tis well to contemplate thee thus: / For...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Naomi Mitchison
Her format here has stories or groups of stories introduced and ended with a poem. Topics range from ancient to contemporary, from sexuality to politics. The first poem has Phaedra
telling her sister Ariadne
about...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Elizabeth Moody
She has a sharp eye for gender issues, including those surrounding domestic work. The Housewife's Prayer is addressed to Economy, a name which might be loosely translated as balancing the budget, and ends with the...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Germaine Greer
This book sets out to puncture what it regards as a bubble of uncritical admiration for poetry by women for the sake of the authors' gender. It decries the deodorized, depilated and submissive works of...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Anne Carson
For AC
, eros is a three point circuit between lover, beloved and that which comes between them.
Carson, Anne. Eros The Bittersweet. Princeton University Press.
16
In Kafka's story this geometry can be charted in the relationship between the philosoper, the top...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Carol Rumens
Its tributes to earlier women poets are grounded in Portrait of the Poet as a Little Girl (a belated, oblique answer to James Joyce
), which concludes on the patrilineal prize / which she, disarmed...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
H. D.
This analysis, or collection of aphorisms, treats the ideal of body-mind synthesis, and explores the springs of creation and imagination, and different forms that these take in men and women. The volume includes The Wise...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Anne Carson
The book opens with a sequence of poems, Stops, about love for parents, recognition of approaching death, the the frailty of trivial detail weighted with emotional implication: To my mother, / love / of...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Judith Sargent Murray
She backs this pleasure in modernity with a remarkable grasp of former female history and of the women's literary tradition in English and its contexts. She mentions the Greek foremother Sappho
, the patriotic heroism...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Catharine Amy Dawson Scott
The historical Sappho
had emerged by this date as a potentially lesbian or bisexual figure, for instance in the work of Swinburne
; Michael Field
's Long Ago was published this same year. Dawson's Sappho...
