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 reviewer of this collection in Chambers's Edinburgh Journal unoriginally but flatteringly called SB
the Cumbrian Sappho.
Kushigian, Nancy, and Stephen C. Behrendt, editors. Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period.
Intertextuality and Influence
Eavan Boland
Here she retains her focus on history and on women's lives. The relation between the two is paradoxical. Mise Eire (meaning I am Ireland)
McEvoy, Anne. Conversation about Eavan Boland with Isobel Grundy.
opens: I won't go back to it.
Boland, Eavan. Outside History. Norton.
78-9
Yet in...
Textual Production
Anne Bradstreet
His long, descriptive title begins: The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung up in America; or, Severall Poems, Compiled with Great Variety of Wit and Learning, Full of Delight, before going to enumerate the major poems...
Textual Features
Angela Brazil
Girls in these books sew, roll bandages, dig for victory, arrange care for the children of munitions workers, and raise money in support of the war effort. For the School Colours is also notable for...
Textual Features
Brigid Brophy
There is a strong flavour of Kafka
about this comic parable both of a family and of a state. The royal family of Evarchia (somewhere in contemporary Middle or Eastern Europe) has an authoritarian father...
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...
Textual Features
Frances Burney
The Woman-Hater again features Lady Smatter. This time she drops nearly five times as many authors' names as in The Witlings; only one, Sappho
, is that of a woman.
Health
Dora Carrington
Carrington attempted to give herself a miscarriage by riding a horse violently, and when this did not work she became depressed to a nearly suicidal degree.
Gerzina, Gretchen. Carrington: A Life of Dora Carrington, 1893-1932. John Murray.
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...
Education
Anne Carson
AC
successfully defended her PhD dissertation on the poetry of Sappho
. Titled Odi et Amo Ergo Sum (I hate and love, therefore I am), it eventually became first book project, Eros the...
Education
Anne Carson
When she was in highschool AC
's brother, four years older, liked her to do his homework for him.
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...
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...
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...
