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.
Prins, Yopie. Victorian Sappho. Princeton University Press.
93
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
Textual Production
Mary Bailey
She was mistaken in believing this to be a first: several translations had appeared, often together with the surviving poems of Sappho
and occasionally with other poets as well, as in the version by Thomas Stanley
Textual Production
Clara Reeve
Over the signature C. R., she asserted that women writing were a sign of the rapid progress of the present age towards the refinements of civilization.
The Lady’s Magazine. J. Wheble.
8 (1777): 538
Instead of the single Sappho
Textual Production
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
Textual Production
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...
Textual Production
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...
Textual Production
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
Textual Production
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...
Textual Production
Maureen Duffy
MD
published with Sappho Publications
(which also published the lesbian magazine Sappho, 1972-81, on behalf of the London lesbian social club of that name) another volume of poetry, entitled Evesong.
Duffy, Maureen. Collected Poems. Hamish Hamilton.
prelims, xv
Murdoch, Iris. Living on Paper. Editors Horner, Avril and Ann Rowe, Chatto and Windus.
401
Textual Production
Christina Rossetti
In Sappho, as also in another poem on the Greek lyricist written two years later, fifteen-year-old CR
signalled her interest in the female poetic tradition.
Rossetti, Christina. The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti. Editor Crump, Rebecca W., Louisiana State University Press.
3: 392, 423
Textual Production
Anne Carson
AC
's poetry collection Men in the Off Hours, 2000, variously inhabits the minds (and bodies) of Tolstoy
, Lazarus, Freud
, Catullus
, Sappho
and Emily Dickinson
, not to mention the French...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Elstob
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...
Textual Features
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...
