Editorial Content for After Sappho

Selby Wynn Schwartz is an award-winning American author and Stanford professor. But her debut novel, AFTER SAPPHO, was actually published first in the United Kingdom, which is why it was longlisted for the Booker Prize before most American readers could even get their hands on it. So to call its publication in the US anticipated would be kind of an understatement. Fortunately, it's available here at last, and lucky American readers can finally see what all the fuss is (rightly) about.

"AFTER SAPPHO serves as a call to action for present-day readers not to forget the incredible stories of these 20th-century trailblazers --- and to continue to find creative ways forward."

It's perhaps not a huge surprise that AFTER SAPPHO found a UK publishing home first. Although a handful of American figures appear in its pages, the novel is overwhelmingly European in focus. Since the ancient Greek poet Sappho's work survives primarily in fragments, the book is divided into short segments of no more than a paragraph or two at a time. These vignettes alternate among dozens of real-life feminist creatives in the early 20th century --- women who found their inspiration in the poetry of Sappho, not only in terms of loving other women but in terms of defying tradition and convention in how they lived their lives and created their work.

Some of these names will be familiar to most readers --- Gertrude Stein, Isadora Duncan, Sarah Bernhardt, Virginia Woolf --- but almost everyone will encounter some figure who is new to them. For me, they included the Italian feminist writers Lina Poletti and Sibilla Aleramo, whose stories illustrate the push and pull of legal rights for women in Italy that was part of the process of nation building, as well as Eleonora Duse, an Italian actress who played Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House.

The stories of these women play out in a narrative that stretches from roughly 1900 through 1928, culminating in Woolf's great works, like WOMEN AND FICTION and ORLANDO (a novel that itself encompasses many different lives). Narrating these biographies and tying them together is a plural narrator, a Greek chorus made up of the voices of all the women inspired by Sappho's legacy to find new paths for themselves: "Our lives are the lines missing from the fragments. There is the hope of becoming in all our forms and genres. The future of Sappho shall be us."

Of course, given the timing of these events, the path for those about whom Schwartz writes is anything but straightforward. War, looming fascism and the constant rollback of women's nascent freedoms complicate progress, and another figure from ancient Greece --- the prophet Cassandra --- bears witness to a future that feels precarious, if not outright dangerous. But just as those early feminists strived to fill the spaces between Sappho's fragments, AFTER SAPPHO serves as a call to action for present-day readers not to forget the incredible stories of these 20th-century trailblazers --- and to continue to find creative ways forward.