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.
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
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)...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jane Barker
JB
writes to one male friend (my Adopted Brother) on his approaching marriage, not to congratulate but to dissuade.
Barker, Jane. Poetical Recreations. Benjamin Crayle.
This volume, through its title, invokes a whole tradition of women's poetry. Sappho
was the first to bear the honorific nickname of tenth muse, which was later freely bestowed on writing women (like Anna Maria van Schurman
Intertextuality and Influence
Michael Field
They were greatly influenced in their writing of this book by Henry Thornton Wharton
's recent Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings, and a Literal Translation. Containing John Addington Symonds
' translation of Sappho
's...
Intertextuality and Influence
Adrienne Rich
The title poem comes last. Many of the pieces here, like the volume overall, are dedicated to individuals. They include dialogues between the present and the past or future, between personal life and the enormities...
Intertextuality and Influence
Michael Field
The preface calls Sappho the one woman who has dared to speak unfalteringly of the fearful mastery of love.
Field, Michael. Long Ago. G. Bell and Sons.
Each of the poems that follow begins with an epigraph from Sappho
Titles are numbers, given...
Intertextuality and Influence
Adrienne Rich
First published in 1971 (Rich's collections often include writings issued previously), the essay When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision is described in 1988 by Elizabeth Meese
as still inform[ing] much of the best work...
Intertextuality and Influence
Emily Dickinson
Among our contemporary poets, Adrienne Rich
has offered this reading of ED
's life and works: Emily Dickinson—viewed by her bemused contemporary Thomas Higginson as partially cracked, by the twentieth century as fey or...
Intertextuality and Influence
Natalie Clifford Barney
NCB
's treatment of Sappho
was influenced by Les chansons de Bilitis by French writer Pierre Louÿs
(1894), a fictional work which purported to be a translation (along with biography, bibliography, and scholarly notes) of...
Intertextuality and Influence
Lady Mary Wroth
Interspersed in the body of Urania are fifty-nine poems and sonnets. As printed, the book concludes with three sonnet sequences comprising a further eighty-three sonnets and eighteen songs, in a freshly paginated section. These sequences...
Intertextuality and Influence
Natalie Clifford Barney
Rewriting Ovid
, NCB
attributes Sappho
's death to her love for Timas, a young female disciple, instead of Phaon.
Causse, Michèle. Berthe ou un demi-siècle auprès de l’Amazone. Tierce.
249
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. Yale University Press.
2: 226
The text incorporates quotations from Sappho
, together with footnotes in Greek and critical commentary.
Benstock, Shari. Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940. University of Texas Press.
291
Intertextuality and Influence
Maureen Duffy
Living her afterlife on Mount Parnassus, Duffy's Sappho
is familiar with women poets who have written in English: her favourite is Aphra Behn
.
Duffy, Maureen. “My Life with Aphra Behn”. Women’s Writing, Vol.
19
, No. 2.
244
Intertextuality and Influence
Maria Barrell
The range of styles is wide: from sentiment to burlesque. Poems of sentiment include an epitaph on a woman who died of a broken heart. Others construct a narrative for Maria: she gently and...
Intertextuality and Influence
Charlotte Lennox
The leading topics of these poems are love-relationships and women. The opening poem, A Pastoral, from the Song of Solomon, is erotic in tone. It ends: For Love's as strong as Death, and pow'rful...
