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.
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...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Mary Ann Browne
Sappho
at the Loom again uses the ancient poet as a way of writing about the balance, for a woman, of poetry with more conventional female attributes: 'Tis well to contemplate thee thus: / For...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Naomi Mitchison
Her format here has stories or groups of stories introduced and ended with a poem. Topics range from ancient to contemporary, from sexuality to politics. The first poem has Phaedra
telling her sister Ariadne
about...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Elizabeth Moody
She has a sharp eye for gender issues, including those surrounding domestic work. The Housewife's Prayer is addressed to Economy, a name which might be loosely translated as balancing the budget, and ends with the...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Germaine Greer
This book sets out to puncture what it regards as a bubble of uncritical admiration for poetry by women for the sake of the authors' gender. It decries the deodorized, depilated and submissive works of...
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Anne Carson
For AC
, eros is a three point circuit between lover, beloved and that which comes between them.
Carson, Anne. Eros The Bittersweet. Princeton University Press.
16
In Kafka's story this geometry can be charted in the relationship between the philosoper, the top...
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...
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H. D.
This analysis, or collection of aphorisms, treats the ideal of body-mind synthesis, and explores the springs of creation and imagination, and different forms that these take in men and women. The volume includes The Wise...
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Anne Carson
The book opens with a sequence of poems, Stops, about love for parents, recognition of approaching death, the the frailty of trivial detail weighted with emotional implication: To my mother, / love / of...
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Judith Sargent Murray
She backs this pleasure in modernity with a remarkable grasp of former female history and of the women's literary tradition in English and its contexts. She mentions the Greek foremother Sappho
, the patriotic heroism...
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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...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Caroline Norton
The Picture of Sappho brings the gender and scandal nexus together within a meditation on poetic vocation and expression. As the title suggests, the speaker of the lyric reflects on Sappho
as a culturally produced...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Mary Matilda Betham
Catharine Macaulay
, she insists, was pleasing and delicate in her person, and a woman of great feeling and indisputable abilities, though the democratic spirit of her writings has made them fall into disrepute.
Feminist Companion Archive.
She...
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Christine de Pisan
This is another important work on the social position of women, which musters all the strategies of late-medieval rhetorical debate in discussing such topics as female education and the institution of marriage. It praises distinguished...
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Sarah Lewis
The Last Hour of Sappho, in which the poet kills herself for love of Phaon, is a precursor to Lewis's five-act tragedy about Sappho, which was published a quarter-century or more later. SL
sets...
Timeline
Later 8th century BC: This time probably saw the genesis of Homer's...
Writing climate item
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 poet Louise Labé (c. 1520-1566), a...
Writing climate item
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...
Writing climate item
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...
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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
).
1886: Eva Hope's Queens of Literature of the Victorian...
1968: Peter Jay founded Anvil Press Poetry, which...
Writing climate item
1968
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...
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April 1972
Sappho began monthly publication in London as one of the few magazines written for and about lesbians.
November 1981: The lesbian magazineSappho ended publication...
Building item
November 1981
The lesbianmagazineSappho ended publication in London.
1992: The city of Leiden in the Netherlands initiated...
Writing climate item
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...
Writing climate item
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...
Texts
Burn, Andrew R., and Sappho. “Foreword”. Lyrics in the Original Greek, translated by. Willis Barnstone and Willis Barnstone, New York University Press, 1965, p. vii - xiii.
Burn, Andrew R. et al. “Introduction”. Lyrics in the Original Greek, translated by. Willis Barnstone, New York University Press, 1965, p. xvii - xxxi.
Sappho, and Anacreon. Les Poésies d’Anacréon et de Sapho. Translator Dacier, Anne, D. Thierry and C. Barbin, 1681.
Sappho, and Andrew R. Burn. Lyrics in the Original Greek. Translator Barnstone, Willis, New York University Press, 1965.