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.
EE
's first publication consists of a fairly short essay with some poems to fill out the volume. She celebrates Scudéry as a Sappho
(one of Scudéry's strong female characters is Sapho) and as...
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...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Fenton
Fenton sets out to paint a a familiar picture of the everyday occurrences, manners, and habits of life of persons undistinguished either by wealth or fame
Fenton, Elizabeth. The Journal of Mrs. Fenton. Editor Lawrence, Sir Henry, Edward Arnold.
1-2
in British India. But this is largely unfulfilled...
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Marie Belloc Lowndes
In her reviewing capacity she was able to comment on several texts central to the European tradition of women's writing. She called Marie de Lafayette
's La Princesse de Cleves (re-issued as part of an...
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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...
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Judith Cowper Madan
The poem in its later version, headed with a quotation from Virgil
, opens: Unequal, how shall I the search begin, / Or paint with artless hand the awful scene?
Concanen, Matthew, editor. The Flower-Piece. Walthoe.
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...
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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...
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...
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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
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Emily Dickinson
Their correspondence began when ED
responded to an article Higginson wrote in the Atlantic Monthly entitled Letter to a Young Contributor, which was mostly devoted to describing the proper way to submit an unsolicited...
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Martha Fowke
It has recently been suggested among scholars that MF
is the hitherto unidentified author of another and larger group of poems in the Barbados Gazette. Bill Overton
thinks it possible, Phyllis Guskin
thinks it...
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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
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Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Each issue of To the Imitator was priced at sixpence. One appeared through a trade publisher, James Roberts
, and one through a mercury, Anne Dodd
. Both these were pamphlet-producers who offered...
