Selby Wynn Schwartz, After Sappho, Galley Beggars Press, 2022
Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House, Penguin Random House, 2019
It was probably the ecstatic review by the Guardian that made me buy After Sappho when I was in London this summer (the book is coming out in America early next year). It was on the Booker longlist at that time too, but I had heard of it and its prime lez content much earlier, as its publisher Sam Jordison convincingly gushed about it on Across the Pond podcast and all over social media. It is the kind of book that I usually go for, having been a fully paid-up Bloomsbury-head since the age of eleven. Virginia Woolf made me gay. Janet McTeer as Vita Sackville-West in Portrait of a Marriage helped mightily too.
The premise sounds appealing: After Sappho is narrated by a collective “we,” which comes out of the silences between Sappho’s surviving fragments into a fully grown historical and cultural subject by around the 1920s in Western Europe. This we is, one surmises as one reads, a group of women; perhaps all women; perhaps women who sought freedom (a lot of us to this day prioritise happiness and security over freedom). The Free Women of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook? Women who did not want to be enslaved by fathers and husbands – or their country’s legal system. Women who wanted to be dancers, painters, writers, law makers. From about 1865 to the 1920s, women’s lot was in an accelerated process of change. (Human nature too, as per Woolf. “On or about December 1910 human nature changed,” she wrote in “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown”.) The novel starts from, roughly, Italy’s Pisanelli Code — which gave Italian women the right to act as witnesses in court and to bequeath property after death (and for the very first time to their daughters as well) – and winds down with the first victories of the Votes for Women movement in the early twentieth century.
The heroines whose lives this keen collective narrator follows are however the select few British, American, French and Italian women about whom an enormous amount has already been written. Is there anything left to be said about Natalie Barney’s salon, or the Vita-Virginia shenanigans? How long can the Bloomsbury industry churn on? I’m saying nothing original when I say that it’s the upper class women who broke into freedom and historical subjecthood first – that is how it happens, no escaping it – but are we to invoke their adventures still so breathlessly? For this is a breathless book, excited, optimistic: we are about to burst out onto the scene.