Sappho: The Tenth Muse - Hardcover

Freedman, Nancy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312186606 ISBN 13: 9780312186609

Publisher: St. Martin's Press, 1998

Synopsis

In this finely drawn portrait, Sappho of Lesbos narrates her extraordinary life, from her childhood in war-torn Mitylene to her later relentless search for passionate love. Driven by the all-consuming fever of her Muse-inspired poetic gift, Sappho leads the reader on a journey that is at once turbulent and divine, desperate and sensuous. With breathtaking lucidity and great leaps of imagination, Nancy Freedman shows us a Sappho we have never known -- and one we will never forget. The toast of kings for her verse, Sappho was also a shrewd businesswoman, an educator, an advocate of women's equality, and a rebel who was banished from her island home. Remembering her solely as a lesbian icon reveals only one aspect of her multifaceted personality. Here, finally, Nancy Freedman gives us the complete Sappho. She was arguably the most accomplished lyric poet of the ancient world, but her writing was all but destroyed by the early Church. Only in this century have fragments been unco

About this title

About the Author:

Nancy Freedman is the author of the novel Sappho.

From Kirkus Reviews:

From veteran writer Freedman (The Seventh Stone, 1992, etc.), a fictionalized life of the Greek poet, more pulpy than not. Plato called Sappho, who hailed from the island of Lesbos, the ``tenth Muse.'' Her poetry has been celebrated in her time and ours for beauty of language and emotional expressiveness. The daughter of a noble family, she married the rich merchant Kerkolas, bore a daughter named Kleis, and founded a school for young womendone commonly enough on the island thenwhile writing poetry that, until recent discoveries, survived in fragments. Freedman, helped by the poems and quoting frequently from them, expands on these facts in her lush and graphic prose, giving an account that has the Greeks turning nearly every feast and festival into an orgy. The author also indulges in some fairly breathless psychoanalyzing. Sappho, in her view, was a divided soul sexually, intellectually, morally. And maybe so. For the poet advised freedom for women and slaves, yet she nevertheless arranged for a slave to drown in the course of a funeral entertainment. Moreover, she connived marriage for one of her pupils so that Sappho could seduce her friend Atthis. She also disowned her brother for marrying a former prostitute, but herself seduced young women and a handsome sailor without apparent regrets. With much literary winking, Freedman takes note of Sappho's fear that she would be remembered for ``ill and not for good,'' that her name and her island home would ultimately be abominated and her poetry dismissed. The psychodrama adds a flavor of prurience to the story. But Freedman never really explains, despite all the lip-smacking, how or why Sappho, who committed suicide when her muses faltered and her lovers and family abandoned her, became such an eminent figure in the first place. A lubricious celebrity bio, fun if not earnest. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0312186606
• ISBN 13: 9780312186609
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352