★ 10/17/2022
Schwartz’s brilliant debut novel (after the critical study The Bodies of Others: Drag Dances and Their Afterlives ) recreates the lives of feminists in the early 20th century. The collective first-person “we” narrator—a Greek chorus devoted to the female poet Sappho—weaves the stories of writers, painters, and performers who, like Sappho, are attracted to women and are determined to become their authentic selves through art. Many of the threads revolve around Lina Poletti, who thrives in her classical studies in Bologna despite Italian laws restricting the rights of women. She writes poetry and plays about women, and has romances with another writer, Sibilla Aleramo, who’d been forced to marry the rapist who got her pregnant; and the stage actor Eleonora Duse, best known for her portrayal of Nora in A Doll’s House . They, along with expat American writer Natalie Barney, poet Renée Vivien, and painter Romaine Brooks, carve out a place in European society during a time when lesbianism is ignored, not criminalized. Then comes WWI: Brooks and others drive ambulances at the front, Virginia Woolf begins writing about Cassandra, and Poletti writes war poems. At the war’s end, a British parliamentarian accuses an actor of lesbianism in the press, thus placing women’s sexuality under intense public scrutiny. As the chorus narrates, “we were plunged back into a history we had barely survived the first time.” Schwartz’s account of what happens next as the central characters resist oppression speaks volumes on their efforts, and she contributes her own work of art with this irresistible narrative. Schwartz breathes an astonishing sense of life into her timeless characters. (Jan.)
"Desire, art and politics lead the dance in After Sappho . . . a mesmerising, uplifting and most inspiring novel. It’s a great literary achievement. As we tangle across time with the dazzling female artists who are its reimagined historical subjects (from Sappho to Virginia Woolf), we understand that we are connected in our transhistoric longings to live more audaciously, more fully, closer to ourselves."
"This one-of-a-kind book channels a spirit of righteous anger as well as lyrical freedom and joy."
Guardian - Justine Jordan
"A highly original, practically uncategorisable novel... Sarah Bernhardt, Virginia Woolf, the Italian writer and lesbian Lina Poletti, plus a host of other lesser-known women who pushed against the conventions of the time — all are given fresh life in this entrancing choric collage of a novel which seems to speak both in one voice and in multitudes all at the same time... I loved it."
Daily Mail - Claire Allfree
"Long-listed for the 2022 Booker Prize, this time-leaping novel connects a pantheon of queer literary titans — Sappho! Oscar Wilde! Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West! — with one muse. This book reads as if it’s skipping: full of movement, lightness, and whimsical defiance."
"A call to action for present-day readers not to forget the incredible stories of these 20th-century trailblazers—and to continue to find creative ways forward."
Bookreporter - Norah Piehl
"After Sappho considers the intimate moments beyond historical record, shifting our gaze and questioning the discipline of history itself. Schwartz builds a novel around women’s struggles for self-determination, excising the men who were in their way. For the most part, these men simply do not appear in the book at all. The novel is erudite and chatty, grounded in scholarship yet freed from any masculinist impulse for certainty or linear cohesion. She draws from history in order to reimagine it. 'Have you forgotten that a poet lies down in the shade of the future?' Schwartz asks. 'She is calling out, she is waiting. Our lives are the lines missing from the fragments.'"
New York Times - Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
"After Sappho is a project of both imagination and intimacy, but also of significant research. Schwartz’s protagonists are all real people, but she has captured the essence of their lives and identities by means of what she describes as 'speculative biographies'. One of the beauties of this strange, spellbinding novel – other, that is, than the dreamlike, pellucid writing – is this merging of fact and fiction, historical record and artistic vision."
The Telegraph - Lucy Scholes
11/01/2022
DEBUT Throughout history, women have struggled to be seen as humans rather than property, to make their own decisions and to love as they chose, and Schwartz's intricate debut—long-listed for the Booker Prize—chronicles the efforts of real-life women to liberate themselves from male dominance in the mid-1800s to the late 1920s. Born Sibilla Aleramo in 1876 Italy, Rina Faccio had to write under a pseudonym to publish her work. She was raped and then, by both law and custom, forced to marry her rapist. The women whose stories follow strove to break away from this appalling type of codified bondage, with figures from French actress Sarah Bernhardt to U.S. painter Romaine Brooks to British author Virginia Woolf expanding their genres and voices while fighting for their rights. The book ends in 1927, as women in Great Britain are being granted the right to vote. Based on extensive research, with sources provided at the book's end, Schwartz's vignettes not only imagine conversations between the women she features and their students, lovers, and/or friends but incorporates numerous direct quotes. VERDICT Readers interested in a dramatically fleshed-out account of the history of women's liberation, as well as the arts and literature generally, will find much to appreciate in this book. Recommended.—Joanna M. Burkhardt
★ 2022-10-27 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.
"Words can be an incantation; the right verse can summon desire and a depth of feeling that can seem at odds with the quiet act of reading. Heart rates can rise as readers quietly turn the page, changing even as they remain still. A good phrase can unleash something inside a person; it can unearth and provoke. In Selby Wynn Schwartz’s novel 'After Sappho', long-listed for the 2022 Booker Prize in fiction, the verses of the sixth-century BCE Greek poet do all this and so much more.... Selby Wynn Schwartz writes beautiful prose, with a keen eye toward the playfulness of grammar and the joy of language. This is a book to be consumed slowly, to be savored like a glorious sunset even as it screams the inevitability of night. 'After Sappho' is an incantation against the darkness and a call to the light, however fragmented it may be."
Boston Globe - Adriana E. Ramírez
"Inexplicably mesmerizing, After Sappho is a sui generis work of scholarly fiction written in truly poetic and evocative prose . . . Difficult to fully explain, it is best experienced."
"In her debut novel, Schwartz presents a lavish, vibrant, kaleidoscopic re-imagining of the lives of early twentieth-century Sapphic feminists . . . Blending history and fiction in a lush, sensual style reminiscent of lyric poetry, the novel follows each woman carving out a new life for herself and taking up Sappho's legacy to create art and blaze trails for future generations . . . In an era in which feminism's gains appear to be on shaky ground, this book reminds us of women's interconnectedness across generations, and how those who came before can inspire us to keep going, keep fighting, and keep creating."
BookBrowse - Jo-Anne Blanco
"A brilliant debut . . . In passages often recalling the sensuous prose of Ali Smith, After Sappho tracks not just outer movement, but psychological ambulation, picking up on the subtlest shifts in mood with the delicacy of a weathervane . . . a ravishing mosaic of creative subjectivity and self-fashioning."
"After Sappho accomplishes what only the most generous art can: It makes a more perfect world out of the imperfections of our own. Selby Wynn Schwartz’s first novel follows a meandering course through the late 19th century into the early 20th, focusing on the lives and overlapping connections of an array of real women . . . The result is not quite narrative fiction and not quite history either. It is, however, a work of stirring genius, a catalogue of intimacies and inventions, desires and dreams."
"She is excellent at threading her stories together, collecting people, dispersing them across the world, drawing lovers and friends under one roof to explore an alternative, sororal history. Schwartz’s voice is one of dry wit and cocked eyebrow, mocking the man-made record. In one particularly fantastic sequence, she sends up Noel Pemberton Billing, the British Member of Parliament famous for fabricating 'The Black Book', which he never bothered to write, supposedly containing the name of every lesbian in Britain."
Chicago Review of Books - Connor Harrison
"[After Sappho ’s] tone, despite its emotional restraint, is resolutely celebratory, focused on the steady advancement of women’s rights and sexual freedoms. In this interesting passion project, art is put forth as an unambiguous force of beauty and inspiration."
Wall Street Journal - Sam Sacks
"Lambda finalist Schwartz’s first novel forms a triptych of women who refuse to be stifled by societal expectations of femininity. The story unfolds as a series of sensuous fragments that would make the titular Greek poet proud."