Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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.
Soon after LEL left her mother's house, rumours of an illicit relationship with Jerdan began. The Sunday Times of 5 March 1826 intimated that a well-known English Sappho had produced a child two years previously...
Godden, Rumer. A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep. Macmillan.
218 and n
Leisure and Society
Felicia Hemans
She wrote of Paganini
's playing that its predominant expression was that of overpowering, passionate regret . . . it seemed as if the musician was himself about to let fall his instrument, and sink...
Literary responses
Judith Cowper Madan
JCM
reaped a good deal of praise during her lifetime, but most of it must have been of questionable value to her as a poet. Pope
's To Erinna is typical in casting her as...
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...
Literary responses
Lady Caroline Lamb
When Glenarvon first appeared, said Lady Caroline, William Lamb
admired it so much that it was instrumental in bringing the separated couple back together.
Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan,. Lady Morgan’s Memoirs. Editors Dixon, William Hepworth and Geraldine Jewsbury, AMS Press.
2: 202
Joanna Baillie
discerned its author's ability, but added, Her...
Before the appearance of her first book, Mary Whateley was celebrated by a Walsall poet, Stephen Chatterton
, for excelling Sappho
's odes. During the same period, in 1861, the Gentleman's Magazine published an exaggerated...
Literary responses
Edna St Vincent Millay
William Marion Reedy
, who read this collection in proof, thought it splendid work—all shot through with brightness; the air of the open world in it too.
Milford, Nancy. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Random House.
The volume firmly established her trademark theme of the doomed romantic female poet, and this persona was strongly identified with LEL herself. Her Victorian biographer Laman Blanchard
claimed that LEL and Sappho
were voted one...
Literary responses
Frances Ridley Havergal
The Reverend Charles Tennyson Turner
offered high praise for several of FRH
's poems and noted that Miss Havergal, Sappho
and Mrs Browning
constitute my present female trio. There may be others lying perdues to...
Literary responses
Sarah Wentworth Morton
During her lifetime SWM
was seen as standing at the head of a national tradition of women's writing: in 1791 she was flattered with the honorific titles of both the Sappho
and the Elizabeth Montagu
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...
Literary responses
Ann Yearsley
Elizabeth Isabella Spence
, reporting on a visit to Bristol, mentions AY
as an example of an obscure woman writer of genius.
Spence, Elizabeth Isabella. Summer Excursions. Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme.
71
In 1990 Donna Landry
wrote of her complex contradictions under the heading...
Literary responses
Queen Elizabeth I
The immense and long-lasting interest aroused by Elizabeth is not, of course, primarily due to her writings, any more than were the adulation paid her during her lifetime, the cult of Gloriana, the Virgin Queen...