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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Jan 2023, 272 pages
Paperback:
Jan 2024, 272 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Jo-Anne Blanco
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An exhilarating debut from a radiant new voice, After Sappho reimagines the intertwined lives of feminists at the turn of the twentieth century.
"The first thing we did was change our names. We were going to be Sappho," so begins this intrepid debut novel, centuries after the Greek poet penned her lyric verse. Ignited by the same muse, a myriad of women break from their small, predetermined lives for seemingly disparate paths: in 1892, Rina Faccio trades her needlepoint for a pen; in 1902, Romaine Brooks sails for Capri with nothing but her clotted paintbrushes; and in 1923, Virginia Woolf writes: "I want to make life fuller and fuller." Writing in cascading vignettes, Selby Wynn Schwartz spins an invigorating tale of women whose narratives converge and splinter as they forge queer identities and claim the right to their own lives. A luminous meditation on creativity, education, and identity, After Sappho announces a writer as ingenious as the trailblazers of our past.
After Sappho, by Selby Wynn Schwartz
The problems of Albertine are
(from the narrator's point of view)
a) lying
b) lesbianism,
and (from Albertine's point of view)
a) being imprisoned in the narrator's house.
—Anne Carson, The Albertine Workout
Sappho, c. 630 BCE
The first thing we did was change our names. We were going to be Sappho.
Who was Sappho? No one knew, but she had an island. She was garlanded with girls. She could sit down to dine and look straight at the woman she loved, however unhappily. When she sang, everyone said, it was like evening on a riverbank, sinking down into the moss with the sky pouring over you. All of her poems were songs.
We read Sappho at school, in classes intended merely to teach poetic meter. Very few of our teachers imagined that they were swelling our veins with cassia and myrrh. In dry voices they went on about the aorist tense, while inside ourselves we felt the leaves of trees shivering in the light, everything dappled, ...
For the women in Schwartz's debut novel, Sappho is the flame that kindles their creativity, the beacon that guides them, igniting their love and passion, turning their eyes toward the sea, and lighting the way into new, uncharted waters. The "we" used by the chorus of narrators becomes the "we" of all women who break new ground, transgress societal boundaries, love other women, and emulate Sappho by leaving lasting artistic legacies of their own...continued
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(Reviewed by Jo-Anne Blanco).
Lucy Ellmann, author of Ducks, Newburyport
This book is splendid: Impish, irate, deep, courageous...Brava!
Selby Wynn Schwartz's debut novel After Sappho reimagines the lives of early 20th century lesbian authors and artists. The novel tells the story of how these women ignited a radical feminist movement inspired by the ancient Greek poet Sappho, broke free from conventions to pursue their own desires and creativity, and flourished within their own women-only communities. In her 1907 work Comment les femmes deviennent écrivains (How Women Become Writers), the French writer Aurel, who ran her own literary salon from 1915 until her death in 1948, stated her belief that women should not follow the rules for writing that had been laid down by men. "It was time for women to take language for themselves, Aurel said, even one word at...
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