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.
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...
Textual Production
Sarah Lewis
The American Sarah Lewis
published her play Sappho
, A Tragedy in Five Acts (which was reviewed in England and France, as well as the United States).
At least two sources, American Women...
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...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
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...
Reception
Charlotte Lennox
The Gentleman's Magazine published two poems about this volume, one in June 1749 and one in November 1750. One calls the author Britain's Sappho
.
Gentleman’s Magazine. Various publishers.
19: 278; 20: 518
With the second piece the GM...
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...
Literary responses
Lady Caroline Lamb
When Glenarvon first appeared, said Lady Caroline, William Lamb
admired it so much that it was instrumental in bringing the separated couple back together.
Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan,. Lady Morgan’s Memoirs. Editors Dixon, William Hepworth and Geraldine Jewsbury, AMS Press.
2: 202
Joanna Baillie
discerned its author's ability, but added, Her...
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.
188
Cultural formation
L. E. L.
There are indications, however, that a rather suspect class standing contributed along with somewhat bohemian behaviour to the difficulty she had about weathering scandal. Benjamin Disraeli
famously and snobbishly wrote of a party at the
Leisure and Society
L. E. L.
Soon after LEL left her mother's house, rumours of an illicit relationship with Jerdan began. The Sunday Times of 5 March 1826 intimated that a well-known English Sappho had produced a child two years previously...
Literary responses
L. E. L.
The volume firmly established her trademark theme of the doomed romantic female poet, and this persona was strongly identified with LEL herself. Her Victorian biographer Laman Blanchard
claimed that LEL and Sappho
were voted one...
Textual Features
L. E. L.
LEL's poetic persona in her title poem is deeply indebted to Germaine de Staël
's highly influential Corinne (1807), which depicts the contemporary woman artist as a spontaneous performer of verse to her own musical...
Textual Features
L. E. L.
However, LEL's version of the narratives of her female precursors presents a complex layering of voices framed by that of her Florentine improvisatrice. Even though the speaker has poured [her] full and burning heart /...
Reception
L. E. L.
LEL became strongly associated with a highly gendered construction of female poetic vocation. As Virginia Blain
has argued, she became (with Hemans
, and following their deaths on the cusp of the era) one progenitor...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sylvia Kantaris
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
