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Summary
Summary
Shaking off the dust of 2,600 years, the famous (and infamous) Greek poet shares her wholly engrossing storyIn this finely-drawn portrait, Sappho of Lesbos narrates her extraordinary life, from her childhood in wartorn Mitylene to her relentless adult search for passionate love and the all-consuming fever of her Muse-guided poetic gift. The toast of kings for her verse, Sappho was also a shrewd businesswoman, an educator, an advocate of women's equality, and an aristocrat. This memoir introduces a brilliant, magnetic legend to a new generation.
Author Notes
Nancy Freedman was born Nancy Mars, in Evanston, Illinois on July 4, 1920. She started acting professionally at the age of 3 in local children's stage productions. As a teenager, she toured in director Max Reinhardt's productions of Faust, The Miracle and Six Characters in Search of an Author. She stopped acting after she married Benedict Freedman in 1941.
She wrote numerous books with her husband. Their first novel, Mrs. Mike, was published in 1947. In 1949, it was adapted into a film starring Dick Powell and Evelyn Keyes. Their other works include The Spark and the Exodus, The Search for Joyful, and Kathy Little Bird. She also wrote several books on her own including The Immortals, Joshua Son of None, and Sappho: The Tenth Muse. She died of temporal arteritis on August 10, 2010 at the age of 90.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Classical Greece comes rather luridly to life in Freedman's fictional biography of the Lesbian poet Sappho. Freedman (whose Mrs. Mike remains a classic) sets out to illuminate and humanize the mythical poet by setting the remnants of her corpus, poems and poem-fragments, into the context of her life on Lesbos. Like the Sappho of myth, Freedman's creation is a woman ruled and wrecked by her passions and vanity. Fickle and lustful, she seduces one student after another until, in middle age, she falls in lasting love with Phaon, the young man over whom she eventually kills herself. Laudably, Freedman refuses to judge Sappho or shape this proud, often cruel aristocrat in the image of a modern feminist. Yet one often stumbles over the archaized language of the bookÄHomer rendered awkwardly into pseudo-Victorian proseÄwhich in overheated moments ("I worship at the very apex of the mound of Aphrodite") slips into the language of the bodice-ripper. More successful than the novel's dialogue or narrative voice are Freedman's speculative reconstructions of Sappho's school and of the occasions that gave rise to her frequently obscure work. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
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.
Booklist Review
Although narrated in the third person, Freedman's novel is cast in the form of its subject's memoir of her childhood and career. Born on Lesbos to a mother who had hoped she would be a son, Sappho as a tomboyish child plays outdoors vigorously--a freedom not allowed Athenian girls. Her story includes war, feasts, plague, and the rituals of ancient Greece, as well as insightful depiction of behind-the-throne politics as Sappho becomes famous on account of her poems, which are central to her life. Her coming-of-age does not come easily, however; the young poet bitterly drinks the night away as the woman she loves marries. Soon after, she is banished from Lesbos in the wake of defending her brother from false charges of stealing gold. Journeying to Syracuse, she ponders life among strangers. But her lyric skill makes her well known, acclaimed by royalty then, and, of course, acknowledged now, on the basis of the surviving fragments of her work, as the great woman poet of antiquity. --Whitney Scott
Library Journal Review
Until now we have had only fragments of Sappho. In this wonderful novel, Freedman (Prima Donna, LJ 2/1/81) brings the ancient poet back to life. We learn about Sappho's childhood in a society with few men because of wars, her exile as a young woman as punishment for political activity, her marriage to a rich aristocrat, and how she bargained with the gods to exchange her friend's life for her daughter's. As in the best historical novels, Freedman includes many period details, but she blends them so well into the texture of the story that the reader feels only emotion, the pull of narrative. "I want, I want, I want": this litany of need spoken by Sappho as a child becomes a recurring theme. Freedman also recounts Sappho's quest for romantic love as an adult among the young, accomplished women of the school she founds on her home island of Lesbos. This novel is ultimately successful because it presents Sappho as a contradictory woman with both virtues and faults, weaving in fragments of Sappho's verse and imparting a radiance and sense of authenticity. Highly recommended.ÄDoris Lynch, Monroe Cty. P.L., Bloomington, IN (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
