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Selby Wynn Schwartz’s After Sappho is a novel that brings real women writers, artists, performers and activists into a shared, fragmentary story about creativity, love between women and the right to shape one’s own life. Set chiefly in Europe from the 1880s into the 1920s, it is not a conventional documentary biography: its scenes imagine the inner lives around historical figures rather than documenting every moment as fact.
What is After Sappho about?
The novel follows a constellation of women whose lives, work and relationships intersect across late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe. Among them are Lina Poletti, Virginia Woolf, Natalie Barney, Romaine Brooks, Sarah Bernhardt, Eleonora Duse, Radclyffe Hall, Renée Vivien and Isadora Duncan.
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After Sappho: A Novel | $9.70 | Buy on Amazon |
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After Sappho: Longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize | $39.18 | Buy on Amazon |
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She & Hers | $18.31 | Buy on Amazon |
Rather than tell one person’s life from beginning to end, Schwartz assembles short, titled or dated fragments. The settings move across places including Italy, Paris and London, and the sequence reaches toward the rise of fascism in 1920s Italy. Books, poems, performances and historical moments sit alongside the women’s searches for artistic freedom, intimate connection and control over their own choices.
The title invokes Sappho, the ancient Greek poet whose legacy offers a point of connection for women who love women. In Lara Feigel’s reading for The Guardian, Sappho and Cassandra also suggest a tension: the hope of shared inheritance alongside the risk of failing to heed history’s warnings. That is a critical interpretation, not a single definitive key to the novel.
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How does the novel’s form work?
The fragments make the book feel less like a row of individual biographies and more like a chorus passing stories between voices. Schwartz describes her approach as “wreathing together lives that touched each other in some way” in a Booker Prize interview published August 24, 2022.
A recurring first-person plural “we” gives that chorus its distinctive voice. It gathers and changes as the novel proceeds, connecting women without suggesting that they all thought or lived alike. The form lets a reader move among people, works and contexts while keeping attention on what their lives might have meant to one another.
Are the women in After Sappho real?
Many of the people named in the novel are historical figures, but After Sappho is a novel, not a set of verified biographies. Schwartz has described it as a reimagining of “what women might have thought & felt & created” in a Galley Beggar Press Q&A. That distinction matters: the book uses historical lives as its material while giving literary shape to private thoughts and moments that should not automatically be treated as documented events.
Schwartz has also said she wanted to reverse a familiar historical emphasis: instead of placing prominent men at the center of accounts of women, she wanted to foreground what women thought about and how they related to one another. The result is a work of historical imagination, not a claim that every interior scene can be confirmed from the record.
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How does the book approach queer identity and self-determination?
Self-determination runs through the novel in questions of names, relationships, clothing, art and the freedom to choose the shape of one’s life. Its women seek not only recognition but room to act as complex people and to make decisions about their own futures.
Historical language needs care. People represented in the book did not all describe themselves with the terms readers might use today. Schwartz notes that Radclyffe Hall used the name John and was invested in the period concept of “sexual inversion.” Contemporary labels can help orient readers, but they should not be presented as every historical person’s own words. Schwartz discusses this problem directly in the Galley Beggar Press Q&A.
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Did After Sappho win the Booker Prize?
No. After Sappho was longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize; it did not win. The official Booker book page describes it as a reimagining of feminists, sapphists, artists and writers seeking liberation and justice. The longlisting is a useful distinction when describing the book’s recognition.
Who may enjoy reading it?
The novel may suit readers drawn to queer literary history, women’s creative lives and experimental historical fiction. Its linked fragments and shifting chorus offer a different experience from a linear plot or a single-subject biography. Readers looking for a fully documented account of each person’s life should pair it with biographies or historical sources rather than treat the novel as a factual record of private scenes.
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Outbyte PC Repair FREERepair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsFix Now →Outbyte Driver Updater FREEScan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDriver Scan →The US Liveright/Norton edition is recorded with ISBN 978-1-324-09231-5 by Kirkus Reviews. Publishers Weekly lists paperback and audio editions; availability can vary by retailer and location.
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