'After Sappho' brings women in history to life to claim their stories
Writing on the literary representation of women in A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf mused that "What one must do to bring her to life was to think poetically and prosaically at one and the same moment, thus keeping in touch with fact [...] but not losing sight of fiction either — that she is a vessel in which all sorts of spirits and forces are coursing and flashing perpetually."
, a brilliant debut work from Selby Wynn Schwartz,takes Woolf at her instructive word. Longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, the book is partly a, which she called "my first work in my own style!," eschews plot in favor of riverine vignettes — in this case, of and about historical personages both well-known (Colette, Gertrude Stein, Sarah Bernhardt, and Radclyffe Hall make frequent appearances) and more obscure, like the American writer Natalie Barney, the painter Romaine Brooks, and the actress Eleonora Duse.
