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.
She gave away (on religious principles) half her annual income (she owned some property at Ilchester, her birthplace) as well the only recorded instance of earnings from one of her books. On the whole she...
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...
Textual Features
Lady Margaret Sackville
She set most of her early poems in exotic places. More than one critic has heard the influence of Sappho
in what are sometimes called LMS
's Hellenic verses. In A Hymn to Dionysus...
Literary responses
Mary Savage
The notice in the Critical Review reprinted MS
's prefatory essay on recent female improvements: Instead of the single Sappho
of antiquity, we can muster many names of equal, and some of superior value, in...
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...
Literary responses
Anna Seward
The Critical praised her lively glow of imagination, and bewitching harmony of numbers
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall.
53 (1782): 230
in the poem it printed; it cited her previous elegies on Cook and André, and called her our modern...
Textual Production
Arabella Shore
It reprints some old and presents some new work, including a version of the popular Last Song of Sappho. Death and Immortality, the lead piece in the collection, was the last she had...
Textual Production
Edith Sitwell
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
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.
In the society that Morgan depicts, the Irish Catholic gentry are mostly absent, scattered in European exile. The peasantry, dirt-poor but generous-hearted, include Tim O'Leary, schoolmaster of a hedge school, scholar and expert in Irish...
Education
Alison Uttley
At Manchester, AU
lived in the women's residence, Ashburne House. Formative teachers in her life included Hilda Oakeley
Oakeley, a Somerville College graduate and a close friend of Eleanor Rathbone
, had a great impact...
Other Life Event
Alison Uttley
She had precognitive dreams, including one about Sappho
.
Intertextuality and Influence
Anna Jane Vardill
Her Attic Chest poems have an erudite flavour. She replies to Anacreon
, writes A New Epistle from Sappho
to Phaon, and signs other poems Aulus Gellius
(author of the Latin Attic Nights)...
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.
