The Sappho History

by Margaret Reynolds

In The Sappho History , Margaret Reynolds traces the story of the reception of Sappho's poetry and her afterlife in literature and art from the mid eighteenth-century to the twentieth-century. For women writers in the Romantic period, she symbolized possibility; for the young Tennyson, she was a private ancestor helping him make his own name as a poet. Richly illustrated throughout, The Sappho History provides a new view of Western culture from the Romantic period to the Modern.

Genres: Nonfiction

323 pages, Hardcover

First published September 6, 2003

About the author

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Margaret Reynolds is Professor of English and Modern Culture whose work explores nineteenth to twenty-first century literature, poetry, and the transmission of classical texts. Educated at Oxford and London, her edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh won the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay Prize. She co-edited Victorian Women Poets, authored The Sappho Companion, The Sappho History, and edited Adam Bede for Penguin. A writer and broadcaster for the BBC, The Guardian, and The Times, she also published the memoir The Wild Track in 2021.