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 Last Hour of Sappho, in which the poet kills herself for love of Phaon, is a precursor to Lewis's five-act tragedy about Sappho, which was published a quarter-century or more later. SL
sets...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Anne Dacier
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...
Textual Production
Natalie Clifford Barney
NCB
, under the pseudonym Tryphê, published Cinq petits dialogues grecs, the first of which celebrates Sappho
's love for women.
Tryphe is a Greek word whose meanings include softness, luxuriousness, and wantonness.
Crane, Gregory, editor. Perseus Digital Library. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu.
Causse, Michèle. Berthe ou un demi-siècle auprès de l’Amazone. Tierce.
248
Benstock, Shari. Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940. University of Texas Press.
284
Textual Production
Martha Fowke
It has recently been suggested among scholars that MF
is the hitherto unidentified author of another and larger group of poems in the Barbados Gazette. Bill Overton
thinks it possible, Phyllis Guskin
thinks it...
Textual Production
Emily Dickinson
Their correspondence began when ED
responded to an article Higginson wrote in the Atlantic Monthly entitled Letter to a Young Contributor, which was mostly devoted to describing the proper way to submit an unsolicited...
Textual Production
Mary Robinson
MR
issued one of her best-known works, a sequence of forty-four erotic sonnets entitled Sappho
and Phaon.
Robinson, Mary. “Introduction”. Perdita: The Memoirs of Mary Robinson, edited by Moses Joseph Levy, Peter Owen.
xiii
Textual Production
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Each issue of To the Imitator was priced at sixpence. One appeared through a trade publisher, James Roberts
, and one through a mercury, Anne Dodd
. Both these were pamphlet-producers who offered...
Textual Production
Maureen Duffy
MD
published with Sappho Publications
(which also published the lesbian magazine Sappho, 1972-81, on behalf of the London lesbian social club of that name) another volume of poetry, entitled Evesong.
Duffy, Maureen. Collected Poems. Hamish Hamilton.
prelims, xv
Murdoch, Iris. Living on Paper. Editors Horner, Avril and Ann Rowe, Chatto and Windus.
401
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
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
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
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).
At least two sources, American Women...
Textual Production
Catherine Carswell
Few of CC
's poems survive, but in 1916 she was regularly sending poetry to Lawrence
for critique. She was clearly choosing bleak material: his comments use the word stark three times in two sentences...
