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 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...
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
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...
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...
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...
Wealth and Poverty
Elizabeth Singer Rowe
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...
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
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
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 Features
Mary Robinson
MR
's preface quotes that of Charlotte Smith
to her Elegiac Sonnets.
Robinson, Mary. “Introduction”. Mary Robinson: Selected Poems, edited by Judith Pascoe, Broadview, pp. 19-64.
45
She presents her own work as one of scholarship, explaining that by legitimate in her title she means the sonnet in...
Intertextuality and Influence
Adrienne Rich
The title poem comes last. Many of the pieces here, like the volume overall, are dedicated to individuals. They include dialogues between the present and the past or future, between personal life and the enormities...
Intertextuality and Influence
Adrienne Rich
First published in 1971 (Rich's collections often include writings issued previously), the essay When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision is described in 1988 by Elizabeth Meese
as still inform[ing] much of the best work...
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
Literary responses
Kathleen Raine
Graham Greene
responded to this book with what he called an enthusiastic if ignorant howl. Though he had already seen and admired some of her poems, he wrote, he had not realised the quantity of...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sally Purcell
On a Cenotaph quotes a phrase from Baudelaire
's poem Lesbos: the shocking juxtaposition of a dead body with adoration in le cadavre adoré di Sapho
. Though SP
supplied notes to some things...
