"Sappho and Phaon" by Mary Robinson is a poignant sonnet sequence that breathes life into the legendary tale of the ancient poetess Sappho's tragic love. Robinson, known as 'the English Sappho, ' was a pioneering female author and feminist trailblazer with a dramatic life story. Abandoned by her father at a young age, she turned to teaching and acting, capturing the heart of the Prince of Wales before transforming into a respected writer. In this work, Robinson reimagines Sappho not as the iconic figure of later centuries, but as the Renaissance had often portrayed her: a tortured lover, hopelessly enamored with Phaon, a boatman. Her pursuit of Phaon to Sicily and her eventual leap from the Leucadian cliffs symbolize a profound narrative of passionate love and despair. The tale likely resonated deeply with Robinson's own experiences of love and rejection. Robinson's Sappho diverges from historical accuracies, focusing instead on the emotional depth and human complexities of her characters. This sonnet sequence stands as a testament to Robinson's literary talent and her ability to weave personal anguish into timeless art. "Sappho and Phaon" invites readers to experience a moving portrayal of love, loss, and the enduring power of poetry.

The essays in this volume review the seemingly endless permutations wrought on Sappho through centuries of readings and re-writings.

Reading Sappho considers Sappho's poetry as a powerful, influential voice in the Western cultural tradition. Essays are divided into four sections: "Language and Literary Context," "Homer and Oral Tradition", "Ritual and Social Context", and "Women's Erotics". Contributors focus on literary history, mythic traditions, cultural studies, performance studies, recent work in feminist theory, and more. A legendary literary figure, Sappho has attracted readers, critics, and biographers ever since she composed poems on the island of Lesbos at the close of the seventh century B.C. Bringing together some of the best recent criticism on the subject, this volume, together with Re-Reading Sappho, represents the first anthology of Sappho scholarship, drawing attention to Sappho's importance as a poet and reflecting the diversity of critical approaches in classical and literary scholarship during the last several decades.

In Sappho in Early Modern England, Harriette Andreadis examines public and private expressions of female same-sex sexuality in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Before the language of modern sexual identities developed, a variety of discourses in both literary and extraliterary texts began to form a lexicon of female intimacy. Looking at accounts of non-normative female sexualities in travel narratives, anatomies, and even marital advice books, Andreadis outlines the vernacular through which a female same-sex erotics first entered verbal consciousness. She finds that "respectable" women of the middle classes and aristocracy who did not wish to identify themselves as sexually transgressive developed new vocabularies to describe their desires; women that we might call bisexual or lesbian, referred to in their day as tribades, fricatrices, or "rubsters," emerged in erotic discourses that allowed them to acknowledge their sexuality and still evade disapproval.

Mary Robinson’s work has begun again to assume a central place in discussions of Romanticism. A writer of the 1790’s—a decade which saw the birth of Romanticism, revolution, and enormous popular engagement with political ideas—Robinson was acknowledged in her time as a leading poet. Her writing exhibits great variety: charm, theatricality, and emotional resonance are all characteristics Robinson displays. She was by turns a poet of sensibility, a poet of popular culture, a chronicler of the major events of the time, and a participant in some of its chief aesthetic innovations. This long-awaited collection is the first critical edition of her poems.

In the Heroides, the Roman poet Ovid wittily plucks fifteen abandoned heroines from ancient myth and literature and creates the fiction that each woman writes a letter to the hero who left her behind. But in giving voice to these heroines, is Ovid writing like a woman, or writing "Woman" like a man? Using feminist and psychoanalytic approaches to examine the "female voice" in the Heroides, Sara H. Lindheim closely reads these fictive letters in which the women seemingly tell their own stories. She points out that in Ovid’s verse epistles all the women represent themselves in a strikingly similar and disjointed fashion. Lindheim turns to Lacanian theory of desire to explain these curious and hauntingly repetitive representations of the heroines in the "female voice." Lindheim’s approach illuminates what these poems reveal about both masculine and feminine constructions of the feminine