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.
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
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
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
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...
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...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
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...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
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...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
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...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
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...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Anna Hume
AH
's version of Petrarch is both forceful and stylistically elegant, even when dealing in conventional style with the pangs of love. Her opening lines have a vigorous forward movement which is perhaps superior even...
