The Sappho History

Greek literature is a masculine world in which females are generally presented as suffering and often guilty victims of tragedy. Sappho's beautiful lyrics are a healthy antidote to this. After an initial discussion of the poems, which present precious memories of lost love and desire, Reynolds focuses on Sappho's treatment at the hands of 18th- and 19th-century poets and artists, notably Tennyson, Swinburne and Mary Robinson. This is a scholarly study, full of poems by Sappho and her disciples, which demonstrates well the power that Sappho's voice had on the Victorian Romantic movement. This is well worth a read.