AFTER SAPPHO

Women fight for love, art, and legal personhood in early-20th-century Europe.

“The first thing we did was change our names,” the prologue, set circa 630 B.C.E., begins. “We were going to be Sappho.” This particular we, with which this formally inventive blend of fiction, biography, linguistics, and history is lushly narrated, invokes the collective voice of Sappho and women throughout time who have been taken with Sapphic desires—both corporeal and poetic. The story—told, fittingly, in fragments—follows the lives of women writers, artists, actors, dancers, and activists who lived in the early 20th century: Eleonora Duse, Virginia Woolf, Radclyffe Hall, Natalie Barney, Romaine Brooks, and more. (The novel is dedicated “a tuttə voi che siete Lina Poletti,” a nod to the Italian writer and femminista who features prominently in these pages.) The fragments, each labeled with a year, a central character, the title of a book or poem, an article of Italian law, or some combination thereof, hop around in time but more or less lead the reader from the end of the 19th century up until the rise of fascism in 1920s Italy. Recurrent concerns are the love affairs and friendships between the women, cultural and legal attitudes toward lesbianism, the ancient echoes of tragic heroines in modern life, and the laws that protect men at the expense of the women they abuse. Toward the end of the novel, the narrator writes of the biographies of great men, “We had all read those old lives…those lives were invariable in shape, bowed taut from portentous birth to the elegiac mode employed at the funerals of great men.” This book dares to invent a new form, one that embraces the maddening fragmentation of so many important women in history and reclaims it as a kind of revolutionary beauty.

An exciting, luxurious work of speculative biography.