After Sappho by Selby Wynne Schwartz

I am not 100% sure that I got the message in this book, the second to last nominee for the 2022 Booker Prize longlist that I have read. The collective voice of women is at the center of this book, from Sappho up into the early 21st century, their voices are intermixed throughout. Virginia Woolf, one of my favorites when I was a young woman and thought that everything was possible, is part of a chorus that forms the narrative voice, calling for a collective experience of being female across history. The book comprises biographical fragments of the lives of historically vocal independent women, moving us mainly forwards through time from 1880s Italy, where the baby who will grow up to be Italian poet Lina Poletti begins, to 1920s Paris and London. We encounter Natalie Barney, Romaine Brooks, Sarah Bernhardt, Isadora Duncan, Nancy Cunard, Gertrude Stein and Radclyffe Hall. Poletti has a leading role and is a shape-shifting, visionary, apparently seducing most of the great women of her age. I enjoyed this, and I am deeply sympathetic to the message within, but I did not love it.