Sappho

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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.
Circular portrait from a fresco in ancient Pompeii, popularly identified as Sappho though it probably portrays a high-society Pompeian lady. She is clad in blue, green, and purple, with a gold net over her short, curly hair, and large gold hoop earrings. She holds a wax tablet and a stylus ready for writing. bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbNaples National Archaeological Museum.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
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...
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...
Wealth and Poverty Elizabeth Singer Rowe
She gave away (on religious principles) half her annual income (she owned some property at Ilchester, her birthplace) as well the only recorded instance of earnings from one of her books. On the whole she...

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