ABSTRACT
Sappho is a figure turned to by Letitia Landon (LEL) in 1824, in her popular long poem, The Improvisatrice. She is invoked by a fictional Renaissance Florentine woman poet-LEL presents a lineage of women’s writing here-as providing a link to ‘Forgotten music, still some chance/Vibrate the chord whereon it sleeps’. LEL also resurrected, in imaginative terms, the voice of the young Greek woman poet Erinna, taking her inspiration from the brief sepulchral epigram by Anipater on the young poet. ‘My aim,’ writes LEL, tying herself firmly to tradition, ‘has been to draw the portrait and trace the changes of a highly poetical mind, too sensitive perhaps of the chill and bitterness belonging even to success. The feelings which constitute poetry are the same in all ages, they are acted upon by similar causes.’ The same
year, 1824, Catherine Garnett-best known as a contributor to the fashionable poetry annuals of the years which bridged Romanticism and Victorianismpublished a verse drama, Sappho. The legacy continued, although, during the early decades of the century, Sappho’s poetry can often be found taking second place to her heterosexual and not particularly emulable guise as an abandoned woman, as when Caroline Norton asks, in ‘The Picture of Sappho’:
Didst thou indeed sit there In languid lone despair-
Thy harp neglected by thee idly lyingThy soft and earnest gaze Watching the lingering rays
In the far west, where summer-day was dying-
Such a sentimentalized and idealized figure is treated in terms very different from the prose and fictional polemics designed to change the laws concerning infant custody, marriage and divorce for which Norton was to become best known: polemic arising from her own resistance to resting in defeated languor in her disastrous marriage. Yet the classical figure herself comes, as the century progresses, to bear a more spirited and culturally resistant role, rather than representing a distant, lost ideal. Catherine Dawson’s Sappho of 1889 consists of 210 pages of dramatic monologue spoken by the Greek woman, tacitly making parallels between her own life history and contemporary debates concerning women’s education and social position, arguing against the popular assumption that women have an instinctive love of mastery, and showing Sappho, right up to and including her final leap, as someone who acted on rational, rather than emotional grounds. In the same year ‘Michael Field’, in Long Ago, took Sappho’s fragments (using Dr Wharton’s Sappho, a popular Victorian edition, as their source) and used them as the basis for a series of expanded lyrics, dedicated to the Greek, ‘the one woman who has dared to speak unfalteringly of the fearful mastery of love’. Particularly in the context of that last phrase, ‘Michael Field’ raises a quite separate set of issues concerned with poetic identity, being not one person but two, Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, yoked by love and creativity: ‘My Love and I took hands and swore/Against the world, to be/Poets and lovers evermore.’ It is only in their hands that Sappho’s lesbianism is reasserted: other nineteenth-century women poets (Swinburne provides the most notorious male counter-example) restricted themselves to dealing, explicitly or otherwise, with the transgressions involved in her public utterance.
