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.
AA
arrived at Oxford for the conferring of a D.Litt. degree (at the instigation in part of Isaiah Berlin
); at the ceremony she was called the the Russian Sappho.
Feinstein, Elaine. Anna of all the Russias: The Life of Anna Akhmatova. Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
272
Haight, Amanda. Anna Akhmatova : A Poetic Pilgrimage. Oxford University Press.
189
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 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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jane Barker
JB
writes to one male friend (my Adopted Brother) on his approaching marriage, not to congratulate but to dissuade.
Barker, Jane. Poetical Recreations. Benjamin Crayle.
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 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
Performance of text
Natalie Clifford Barney
NCB
's Equivoque, a play about Sappho
, was privately performed in her garden.
Causse, Michèle. Berthe ou un demi-siècle auprès de l’Amazone. Tierce.
249
Family and Intimate relationships
Natalie Clifford Barney
At sixteen, NCB
fell in love with Eva Palmer
, a biscuit heiress whose family vacationed with hers in Bar Harbor, Maine. Eva introduced NCB
to Sappho
's poetry and instigated her lifelong appreciation for Greek culture.
Chalon, Jean. Portrait of a Seductress: The World of Natalie Barney. Translator Barko, Carol, Crown.
11-12
Benstock, Shari. Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940. University of Texas Press.
277
Intertextuality and Influence
Natalie Clifford Barney
NCB
's treatment of Sappho
was influenced by Les chansons de Bilitis by French writer Pierre Louÿs
(1894), a fictional work which purported to be a translation (along with biography, bibliography, and scholarly notes) of...
Intertextuality and Influence
Natalie Clifford Barney
Rewriting Ovid
, NCB
attributes Sappho
's death to her love for Timas, a young female disciple, instead of Phaon.
Causse, Michèle. Berthe ou un demi-siècle auprès de l’Amazone. Tierce.
249
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. Yale University Press.
2: 226
The text incorporates quotations from Sappho
, together with footnotes in Greek and critical commentary.
Benstock, Shari. Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940. University of Texas Press.
291
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Maria Barrell
The range of styles is wide: from sentiment to burlesque. Poems of sentiment include an epitaph on a woman who died of a broken heart. Others construct a narrative for Maria: she gently and...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
EOB
writes in terms of a women's tradition: for instance, she praises Barbauld
for praising Elizabeth Rowe
. She makes confident judgements and attributions (she is sure that Lady Pakington
is the real author of...
Literary responses
Mary Matilda Betham
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
wrote To Matilda Betham
from a Stranger (later published privately), wishing that she might be as impassioned as Sappho
—but holier and happier.
Wordsworth, Jonathan. The Bright Work Grows: Women Writers of the Romantic Age. Woodstock Books.
202
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Mary Matilda Betham
Catharine Macaulay
, she insists, was pleasing and delicate in her person, and a woman of great feeling and indisputable abilities, though the democratic spirit of her writings has made them fall into disrepute.
Feminist Companion Archive.
She...
Timeline
Later 8th century BC: This time probably saw the genesis of Homer's...
Writing climate item
Later 8th century BC
This time probably saw the genesis of Homer's Iliad, though few dates are more hotly argued over, and the very existence of Homer as a person who created (traditional, formulaic, oral) epicpoems is arguable.
1555: French poet Louise Labé (c. 1520-1566), a...
Writing climate item
1555
French poetLouise Labé
(c. 1520-1566), a salonnière in the city of Lyons, daughter and wife of rope-makers, published her Oeuvres at Lyons.
1691: William Walsh published anonymously A Dialogue...
Writing climate item
1691
William Walsh
published anonymously A Dialogue Concerning Women, Being a Defence of the Sex, Written to Eugenia.
1764: German labouring-class poet Anna Luise Karsch...
Writing climate item
1764
German labouring-class poet Anna Luise Karsch
first reached print with four separate publications at Berlin, most importantly a collection, Auserlesene Gedichte (edited for publication by J. G. Sulzer
).
1886: Eva Hope's Queens of Literature of the Victorian...
1968: Peter Jay founded Anvil Press Poetry, which...
Writing climate item
1968
Peter Jay
founded Anvil Press Poetry
, which by the early twenty-first century was based in Greenwich in south-east London, and described itself as England's longest-standing independent poetry publisher.
April 1972: Sappho began monthly publication in London...
Building item
April 1972
Sappho began monthly publication in London as one of the few magazines written for and about lesbians.
November 1981: The lesbian magazineSappho ended publication...
Building item
November 1981
The lesbianmagazineSappho ended publication in London.
1992: The city of Leiden in the Netherlands initiated...
Writing climate item
1992
The city of Leiden in the Netherlands initiated its Tegen-Beeld
, or Wall Poems, by painting on a wall a poem by Marina Tsvetajeva
or Tsvetaeva: the design is important as well as the words.
April 2016: A bot, or Twitter account programmed to issue...
Writing climate item
April 2016
A bot, or Twitter
account programmed to issue a piece of writing divided into fragments of 140 characters or less, entitled Sappho
@sapphobot, was launched this month and became Twitter's most popular poetry bot (apart from...
Texts
Burn, Andrew R., and Sappho. “Foreword”. Lyrics in the Original Greek, translated by. Willis Barnstone and Willis Barnstone, New York University Press, 1965, p. vii - xiii.
Burn, Andrew R. et al. “Introduction”. Lyrics in the Original Greek, translated by. Willis Barnstone, New York University Press, 1965, p. xvii - xxxi.
Sappho, and Anacreon. Les Poésies d’Anacréon et de Sapho. Translator Dacier, Anne, D. Thierry and C. Barbin, 1681.
Sappho, and Andrew R. Burn. Lyrics in the Original Greek. Translator Barnstone, Willis, New York University Press, 1965.
