Sappho

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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.
Circular portrait from a fresco in ancient Pompeii, popularly identified as Sappho though it probably portrays a high-society Pompeian lady. She is clad in blue, green, and purple, with a gold net over her short, curly hair, and large gold hoop earrings. She holds a wax tablet and a stylus ready for writing. bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbNaples National Archaeological Museum.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Textual Production Jane Porter
In 1800 appeared a pamphlet essay which may be by JP or to her and her sister : A Defence of the Profession of an Actor.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Stuart Bennett Rare Books & Manuscripts: A Catalogue of Books By, For, and About Women of the British Isles, 1696-1892. Stuart Bennett Rare Books & Manuscripts.
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and Thomas McLean
Textual Production Michael Field
Writing as MF , Katharine Harris Bradley and Edith Cooper published Long Ago, a collection of poems written around the surviving fragments of Sappho .
Prins, Yopie. Victorian Sappho. Princeton University Press.
93
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
Textual Production Mary Catherine Hume
MCH 's Sappho , A Poem, criticises male supremacy and celebrates the capacities of women.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
Textual Production Mary Bailey
She was mistaken in believing this to be a first: several translations had appeared, often together with the surviving poems of Sappho and occasionally with other poets as well, as in the version by Thomas Stanley
Textual Production Clara Reeve
Over the signature C. R., she asserted that women writing were a sign of the rapid progress of the present age towards the refinements of civilization.
The Lady’s Magazine. J. Wheble.
8 (1777): 538
Instead of the single Sappho
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.
OCLC WorldCat. http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch/content/worldcat/. Accessed 1999.
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 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 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 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 Features L. E. L.
LEL's poetic persona in her title poem is deeply indebted to Germaine de Staël 's highly influential Corinne (1807), which depicts the contemporary woman artist as a spontaneous performer of verse to her own musical...
Textual Features Ann Yearsley
In the added lines AY modifies her original opinion that true friendship is impossible if the friends are not equals in rank. In the last of these poems (a complex discussion of the issue of...
Textual Features Natalie Clifford Barney
In L'amour défenduNCB defends the proposition that only love is important, not the sex to whom it is directed.
Barney, Natalie Clifford, and Karla Jay. A Perilous Advantage: The Best of Natalie Clifford Barney. Translator Anna Livia, New Victoria Publishers.
85
She argues that every person possesses both masculine and feminine principles: We should not...
Textual Features L. E. L.
However, LEL's version of the narratives of her female precursors presents a complex layering of voices framed by that of her Florentine improvisatrice. Even though the speaker has poured [her] full and burning heart /...

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