num_pages: 272
description: What did we want? To begin with we wanted what half the population had got by just being born. Its 1895. Amid laundry and bruises Rina Pierangeli Faccio gives birth to the child of the man who raped her  the man she has been forced to marry. Unbroken she determines to change her name and alongside it her life.1902. Romaine Brooks sails for Capri. She has barely enough money for the ferry nothing for lunch; her paintbrushes are bald and clotted. But she is sure she can sell a painting  and is fervent in her belief that the island is detached from all fates she has previously suffered.In 1923 Virginia Woolf writes: I want to make life fuller  and fuller.Told in a series of cascading vignettes featuring a multitude of voices After Sappho reimagines the lives of a brilliant group of feminists sapphists artists and writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as they battle for liberation justice and control over their own lives.Sarah Bernhardt Colette Eileen Gray Lina Poletti: these are just a few of the women (some famous others hitherto unsung) sharing the pages of a novel as fierce as it is luminous. Lush and poetic furious and funny After Sappho celebrates the women and trailblazers of the past  and offers hope for our present and our futures.
language: English
title: After Sappho
publisher: Liveright