But she immediately questions that characterization: “This is a work of fiction,” Schwartz states in an afterword. Narrated in the first-person plural, After Sappho is like a choral memoir, the chorus assembled temporally as well as spatially. Schwartz is knowledgeable and she is certainly polemical, but After Sappho reads gently, insistently, a quiet explosion of struggles and triumphs, of absurd conventions and absurd rebellions against them, wafting delicately down through decades. Biography, fragments of poetry, legal history, feminist history, theater criticism, art criticism, architecture criticism, literary criticism, Greek grammar, gynecological discussion, and both well-known and obscure sapphist lore all loop their way through this intricately fashioned book. Schwartz precedes most vignettes with a specific date, so that they appear as tiny episodes in time, though they don’t necessarily follow chronological order.Īfter Sappho is a story woven from many stories.

Schwartz begins the novel in 1885 with a fragment announcing the birth of the poet and playwright Lina Poletti-who was “born into a line of sisters who didn’t understand her”-and ends it in 1928 with Virginia Woolf, that sister who understood so much. There are, however, a number of historical women who may not be familiar at all. The many colorful, troubled, and valiant characters break from the bonds of oppressive tradition and find themselves, and one another, in an inspired era of secretive but glorious freedom that does not last.Ĭolette and Gertrude Stein and Natalie Barney and a few other sapphic household names appear for those familiar with the great lesbian flowering of this time, many of the other characters and their tales will also be familiar. The basic story of After Sappho is both simple and engaging: in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a number of talented, daring women, all inspired by the Greek poet, create some of the period’s most important artworks. After Sappho, a novel by Selby Wynn Schwartz that was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022, is many things, none of them satirical, but I kept thinking of the title of Mackenzie’s book as I read it. The one I love, however, is Extraordinary Women: Theme and Variations (1928), a satirical roman à clef about the sapphic adventures of the unorthodox and eccentric inhabitants of an island modeled after Capri during World War I. One of my favorite novels is by Compton Mackenzie, a Scottish writer known today, if he is known at all, for his whimsically comic Whisky Galore (1947) and his ambitious early novel Sinister Street (1913). Frontispiece of Natalie Barney’s Aventures de l’Esprit, depicting the friendships among the visitors to her Paris salon, 1929

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