A NOVEL, BUT an unconventional one.
It has a lot in common with group biography (as in Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club or Jenny Uglow's The Lunar Men), since it presents a cast of notable lesbian writers and artists who lived in Europe and England in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: Nathalie Barney, Romaine Brooks, Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, René Vivien, Radclyffe Hall, and quite a few others. The title points to how discovering Sappho was a moment of recognition for many of these women, and how those tantalizing fragments became a place for them to meet and know each other.
Given its objects of attention, it also has a lot in common Lisa Cohen's All We Know in depicting the relatively more privileged regions of a 20th century lesbian cultural milieu.
However, stylistically, it also has a lot in common with Eduardo Galeano's amazing three-volume history of Latin America, Memory of Fire, which also told its story through short, vividly written vignettes rather than in conventional historiographical discourse.
Schwartz begins the 17-page "Bibliographical Note" at the end of the volume by acknowledging that the genre question is up for grabs: "This is a work of fiction. Or possibly it is such a hybrid of imaginaries and intimate non-fictions, of speculative biographies and 'suggestions for short pieces' [...] as to have no recourse to a category at all."
Several dissertations worth of research went into the book, as the note attests, but Schwartz felt free to invent, embroider, rearrange, and omit. As she mentions, she simply omits Gabriele d'Annunzio, the flamboyant writer who loomed large in the lives of some of her subjects, which would be a problem if this were meant to be a comprehensive history--but it isn't. A comprehensive history would likely also spend more time on Stein and Toklas, but I was glad to read instead about Lina Poletti and Sibilla Aleramo, figures much less known in the English-speaking world than Alice and Gertrude.
After Sappho is a brisk and enlightening read. Given that is subjects are mainly white and independently wealthy, I wonder whether Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments makes for a comparable project that it is a little nearer the bull's-eye of the zeitgeist. Well, we'll see.
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