"Someone will remember us, I say, even in another time."
—Sappho, fragment 147

"Who was Sappho?" asks Selby Wynn Schwartz in the prologue to After Sappho. An ancient Greek lyric poet whose work survives only in fragments, most of Sappho's life has been the subject of fanciful speculation. We know she was from Lesbos; we know she was exiled to Sicily; we know that she had an island and was, as the prologue says, "garlanded with girls." Much of her work has been lost, but Sappho herself survives in collective memory as an extraordinary woman and artist who blazed her own trail and became legend.

For the women in this novel, and for the narrators who chronicle and comment upon the unfolding events like a Greek chorus, Sappho is the flame that kindles their creativity, the beacon that guides them, igniting their love and passion, turning ...