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.
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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...
Cultural formation
Anne Damer
Soon after her husband's death, obscene libels (bearing a political subtext) began to appear against AD
. William Combe
led the way in a couplet satire, The First of April; or, The Triumphs of Folly...
Cultural formation
L. E. L.
There are indications, however, that a rather suspect class standing contributed along with somewhat bohemian behaviour to the difficulty she had about weathering scandal. Benjamin Disraeli
famously and snobbishly wrote of a party at the
death
Anna Wickham
Although AW
's suicide came with little warning, she showed, in an unfinished autobiography written more than ten years earlier, a portentous awareness of a tradition of suicide among women poets: There have been few...
death
Eva Gore-Booth
She and Esther Roper are buried in a single grave in a Hampstead churchyard: the grave is marked with a Celtic cross
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
and an epitaph quoting Sappho
: Life that is Love is God.
Donoghue, Emma. “’How could I fear and hold thee by the hand?’: The Poetry of Eva Gore-Booth”. Sex, Nation, and Dissent in Irish Writing, edited by Éibhear Walshe and Éibhear Walshe, St Martin’s Press, 1997, pp. 16 -42.
36
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...
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.
At home the Lerner children learned Yiddish songs and made up silly plays.
Reid, Panthea. Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles. Rutgers University Press, 2010.
27
Tillie was a difficult child, skipping family chores to spend time at the public library, with its huge painting of...
Family and Intimate relationships
Natalie Clifford Barney
At sixteen, NCB
fell in love with Eva Palmer
, a biscuit heiress whose family vacationed with hers in Bar Harbor, Maine. Eva introduced NCB
to Sappho
's poetry and instigated her lifelong appreciation for Greek culture.
Chalon, Jean. Portrait of a Seductress: The World of Natalie Barney. Barko, CarolTranslator , Crown, 1979.
11-12
Benstock, Shari. Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940. University of Texas Press, 1986.
277
Fictionalization
Violet Fane
In 1877 Fane's Sincere Friend
Mallock, W. H. The New Republic. Scribner and Welford, 1878.
prelims
W. H. Mallock
dedicated his roman à clef The New Republic; or, Culture, Faith, and Philosophy in an English Country House to her .
Mallock, W. H. Memoirs of Life and Literature. Chapman and Hall, 1920.
96
She is said to...
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, 1989.
The book positions itself in relation to cultural, social and emotional markers that are not those of a majority in later times. Helen and Felicia read Northanger Abbey aloud, and Helen admits it to be...
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...
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)...
Timeline
Later 8th century BC
This time probably saw the genesis of Homer's Iliad, though few dates are more hotly argued over, and the very existence of Homer as a person who created (traditional, formulaic, oral) epicpoems is arguable.
1555
French poetLouise Labé
(c. 1520-1566), a salonnière in the city of Lyons, daughter and wife of rope-makers, published her Oeuvres at Lyons.
1691
William Walsh
published anonymously A Dialogue Concerning Women, Being a Defence of the Sex, Written to Eugenia.
1764
German labouring-class poet Anna Luise Karsch
first reached print with four separate publications at Berlin, most importantly a collection, Auserlesene Gedichte (edited for publication by J. G. Sulzer
).
Peter Jay
founded Anvil Press Poetry
, which by the early twenty-first century was based in Greenwich in south-east London, and described itself as England's longest-standing independent poetry publisher.
April 1972
Sappho began monthly publication in London as one of the few magazines written for and about lesbians.
November 1981
The lesbianmagazineSappho ended publication in London.
1992
The city of Leiden in the Netherlands initiated its Tegen-Beeld
, or Wall Poems, by painting on a wall a poem by Marina Tsvetajeva
or Tsvetaeva: the design is important as well as the words.
April 2016
A bot, or Twitter
account programmed to issue a piece of writing divided into fragments of 140 characters or less, entitled Sappho
@sapphobot, was launched this month and became Twitter's most popular poetry bot (apart from...
