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.
Circular portrait from a fresco in ancient Pompeii, popularly identified as Sappho though it probably portrays a high-society Pompeian lady. She is clad in blue, green, and purple, with a gold net over her short, curly hair, and large gold hoop earrings. She holds a wax tablet and a stylus ready for writing. bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbNaples National Archaeological Museum.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
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 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...
Literary responses Mary Matilda Betham
Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote To Matilda Betham from a Stranger (later published privately), wishing that she might be as impassioned as Sappho —but holier and happier.
Wordsworth, Jonathan. The Bright Work Grows: Women Writers of the Romantic Age. Woodstock Books, 1997.
202
Literary responses Felicia Hemans
FH was so popular overseas that she was strongly associated, in the mind of Wordsworth at least, with a US audience. Her poems, particularly the Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers in New England from Records...
Literary responses Felicia Hemans
Chorley also wrote the note on FH in The Authors of England: A Series of Medallion Portraits, 1838, claiming for her a place of honour
Chorley, Henry Fothergill, and Achille Collas. The Authors of England. Charles Tilt, 1838.
1
among those treated there, strongly praising The Forest...
Literary responses Susanna Blamire
The reviewer of this collection in Chambers's Edinburgh Journal unoriginally but flatteringly called SB the Cumbrian Sappho.
qtd. in
Kushigian, Nancy, and Stephen C. Behrendt, editors. Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period.
names Anne Bradstreet
  • BirthName: Anne Dudley
  • Married: Bradstreet
  • Pseudonyms: A Gentlewoman of those Parts
    Those parts of course signifies America.
    ; The Tenth Muse
    AB did not choose but was given this nickname, which had been bestowed originally...
Other Life Event Alison Uttley
She had precognitive dreams, including one about Sappho .
Performance of text Natalie Clifford Barney
NCB 's Equivoque, a play about Sappho , was privately performed in her garden.
Causse, Michèle. Berthe ou un demi-siècle auprès de l’Amazone. Tierce, 1980.
249
Performance of text Maureen Duffy
MD wrote a dramatic monologue to be spoken by Sappho (whose poems she had just been writing about), which was performed in London in 2010.
Duffy, Maureen. “My Life with Aphra Behn”. Women’s Writing, Vol.
19
, No. 2, 13 Feb. 2012.
244
Author summary Sarah Lewis
Sarah Anna Lewis was a mid-nineteenth-century American poet who is today better known for her association with Edgar Allan Poe than for her writings. She began her career with frequent periodical publications, then published four...
Author summary Michael Field
As MF , Katharine Harris Bradley and Edith Cooper published twenty-seven tragedies, mostly verse dramas on historical or classical subjects. Only one of their plays was staged, and it received poor reviews. Their unique literary...
Publishing Michael Field
Printing of the book was limited to one hundred copies. (Robert Browning received no. 2.) It was beautifully bound in vellum and printed in two ink colours: MF 's poems in black and Sappho
Publishing Mary Lamb
Mary Lamb 's poem A Lady's Sapphic, an attempt to render Sappho 's style and metre in English, was anonymously printed in The Champion.
Prance, Claude Annett. Companion to Charles Lamb: A Guide to People and Places, 1760-1847. Mansell, 1983.
188

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