Mir’s Reviews > Victorian Sappho > Status Update

EA Poe great admirer of Norton.

A married woman is not existent in law, except for purposes of suffering (C Norton paraphase)

Reading about Caroline Norton always brings me down.

personification conventionally endows a figure with the agency of a person... woman as personified abstraction whose personal agency is suspended

Prins argues that several of Christina Rossetti's poem are implicitly about or influenced by Sappho.

Germaine Greer seems to take at face value Victorian women poets' pretense of private, uncritical writing.

Wm Bell Scott illustration for LEL shows Sappho delicately swooning from the cliff.

L.E.L. makes Sappho express regret for her poetic/musical career, which "poisoned" her life.

Wow, Queen Victoria was a pretty decent etcher! Did not know.

Revisionary readings of the canon by feminist critics often assume a rhetoric of loss, in fact, as if it is only by losing women poets that we can read them anew.