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.
Mallock, W. H. The New Republic. Scribner and Welford.
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.
96
She is said to...
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...
Literary responses
Fidelia
Next month commentators were busy. Jane Brereton
as Melissa addressed both Elizabeth Carter
(whom, in her turn, she supposed to be an anonymous male writer) and Fido, whom she assured that Fidelia ought to...
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
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.
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
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...
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...
Godden, Rumer. A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep. Macmillan.
218 and n
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 et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
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, pp. 16-42.
36
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...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
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...
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...
Leisure and Society
Felicia Hemans
She wrote of Paganini
's playing that its predominant expression was that of overpowering, passionate regret . . . it seemed as if the musician was himself about to let fall his instrument, and sink...
