DNF. Tried for months to get through this and this is dense, like the level I'd read for college, not for pleasure in the LGBTQ section.

After Sappho is an ambitious endeavor, its story laid out in vignettes of prolific lesbian-leaning artists in the early 20th century. The format is very much a reflection of the scattered and lost cotents of Sappho's own works, the identity of the novel and the plot exist simply in fragments.

The prose is bordering poetic, and lines of Sappho's works are intertwined in the story, analyzed and related to the lives of these artists and their own developing careers. There is strength of relationships between the women and each other, and with the way Sapphism led the course of their work.

It is difficult to really describe the plot of this novel as it focuses on many real women, to the degree that the book may suffer from featuring too many characters — everything ends up feeling a bit distant. The details of the time were interesting though, the laws working against our leads, but even then, scarce. And if you aren't familiar with the women featured in this book there may be difficulty keeping track of the events.

This book however, sparked curiousity and a deep dive into the wikipedia articles of these women, I would categorize it as creative nonfiction or speculative but strongly based in true events.

The book was interesting though, I did love to sit with it and be consumed by the language and thoughts posed regarding femininity and sapphism. It is very much a book where we can indulge in the casual lives of women, even in the content there's a section of realization that there's importance in that when a lot of novels featuring women are about the violence perpetrated against them at the time.

I would definitely recommend After Sappho for the literary historians out there!

After Sappho is a fictional reimagining of the lives of a few famous and influential female figures in the literary, poetry, and other artistic fields. The author takes the readers to experience the imaginary stories of these feminists in different time frames to see how they fight for their own rights and equality. They seek full liberation from societies that tend to treat females in a stereotypical approach.

The book is both important and informative at the same time. The reformative approach that the author has taken makes the stories intriguing. However, the continuous jumps from one character to another and from one period to another have hindered the impact that this book should have made on me. I enjoyed the parts about Virginia Woolf the most because I’m already fascinated by her as an author and by her life story in general.

A true hybrid piece both with novel and non fiction, Wynn Schwartz creates a world in which women are the center. This work revolves around creative women surviving in a male dominated world. The topic and the prose were profound and deliberate, but what felt lacking was the insight into the inner workings of the minds of these brilliant women. A gorgeous piece of work.

Thank you NetGalley for this profound ARC.

Thanks to Netgalley and W.W Norton and Company for the e-ARC in exchange for an honest review!

In all honesty, I think I would have preferred this book if it was a short story. Like I adore the conceit of it, the speculative non-fiction about lesbians in the early 1900s and what that meant for their lives. I adored how meticulously researched it was! And I found the intertwined viniette structure, while something of a gimmick, to be one that fit the purpose of the work.

And yet, despite all these positive qualities, the book felt like such an absolute slog to get through. I think the viniette structure would have worked better in a shorter piece, but also I understand the need for it to be longer.

Really, I just wish this had managed to hold my interest and attention more, because while it is so deeply compelling on an intellectual and craft level, it felt like trying to tread mud to read through at certain point.

This is....too much.

It's being force=fed someone's idea of LGBTQ+ history of leadership roles and being told THIS IS IMPORTANT in all caps and that's not enjoyable.

I want a storyline, a plot, a resolution, a murder, a mystery, a romance, something. SOMETHING.

This was a good idea....in theory but could/should have been done better.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the opportunity to read this in advance of its release.

I heard great things about this book, but I just could not get through it. There were too many characters and the interconnected stories did not grip me at all.

Thank you so much to NetGalley and W W Norton & Company, Liveright for the ARC copy for review. After Sappho is available January 24, 2023!

This book was very hard to get in to. It read more like a nonfiction book than fiction. It was a compelling subject matter, but I wish it would have been told more like a story. It’s a fictionalized telling about historical feminists in the 20th century. It just wasn’t for me, but you can tell how much the author loved the subject she was writing about.

"There had been quite enough of women being given, she thought. It was time for women to write into being what they wanted to become."

Given its prudent preoccupation with the notion of casting off names and identities in favour of forging one's own, it seems utterly against my better nature to try and pin a label on AFTER SAPPHO. To try and bend or break it, cut it up into tiny pieces and dissect it with the sole purpose of fitting it comfortably into the mould of a particular genre or style or choice. To find some suitable comparison or point of reference for the sheer brilliance it conveys. I have a list of adjectives in my head (stunning, thought-provoking, quietly powerful, academic, original, innovative) but even that seems to fall short of fully describing that majesty of it.

What I will say is this: Suspend every expectation you've had for a novel ever, then pick this up and allow yourself to be completely carried away by it. Allow yourself to be carried away by this coterie of inspiring and ambitious women... artists, wives, mothers, and creators who refused to conform to society and the patriarchy's ideas of what those labels meant. Allow yourselves to be carried away by its second-person narrator, how its collective "we" seems to invite you into this community of womanhood. Allow yourselves to be carried away by its structure, by how these short poetic vignettes jumping back and forth in time at random (but somehow, also not at random) totally decimate our convictions about what a novel is supposed to look like. And also by how it's so fucking appropriate and empowering that in this book about women creating and loving and living for themselves, in their own unique ways, that Selby Wynn Schwartz is shining a spotlight on THIS question, and how THAT is somehow the most feminist statement of them all. It was Virginia Woolf who famously declared that women require "a room of their own" to create, and now Selby Wynn Schwartz has given women writers a whole form of their own, by which I really mean no form at all unless you wish it, and I could cry, it's so moving.

This book has a really unique style. It takes real events and real women and fictionalizes their lives in a pseudo-stream of consciousness novel. Fiction and fact blend in this story. It is very well written. The themes are well-developed. I really enjoyed all of the thoughts on Greek grammar, which was explained well enough that one does not need to know any Greek.

After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz was a unique read about the power of women. It is definitely a collection worth considering!

This was my first book to read by this author but won't be my last! The story and its characters will stick with you long after you finish the story. Highly recommend!

im sure this is the book for people who enjoy reading more non-fiction and all that jazz, but it simply was not for me

After Sappho has a charming prose and voice and I think it shows how passionate the author is about it's content. I always like things a bit more than usual when I can tell someone genuinely loves a topic to the point that it bleeds off the page.

After Sappho mixes story and fact in a way that is compelling. Many of the historical figures and context were unknown to me until reading this so I enjoyed learning a part of my own history. This will not be a book for everyone, it jumps between ‘characters’ and years frequently and in ways that may not make sense for several pages. I suspect the eARC formatting made this a little choppy compared to the printed version.

Although I did not do this because I didn’t realize it was there, I would encourage readers having difficulty reading the Bibliographic Note first and do a quick research on any names they are unfamiliar with. Likewise, I think having a ‘notable people’ list at the back or front of the book would help.

The book itself tells the story of why the book exists in this format and its relevance. The fragments of Sappho throughout the book bring it together. I wouldn’t say it’s a light beach read but more something you sit and think on, take your time reading. It is profound to read about the attempts of those who came before us to be themselves. I would recommend this with the caveat that this is not a traditional narrative, but a lesson told in poetic prose.

I received an eARC from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

An enjoyable read, this beautifully written historicized biography of little-known women clearly demonstrates the passion the author has for this subject. However, the narrative can become muddled as we hop from woman to woman, as there is no real distinction between these women. The writing, again while beautiful, does not do the leg work to establish who these women truly are. It can, on occasion, feel like you are reading a stylized Wikipedia article. Overall, though, this was an enjoyable read! I learned about so many women who've never crossed my radar, and I look forward to researching them further.

Thank you so much for the copy of After Sappho! This is going to be a treasured gem on my bookshelf. I absolutely love the premise, and the book itself did not disappoint, featuring works by some of my favourite feminist writers. Thank you!

2.5, rounded down. This is a curious hybrid of genres, more a curated collection of non-fictional biographies than a novel. Schwartz splices together the life stories of a hall of fame of lesbian and bisexual writers, artists, actresses, and performers who were prominent in Italy and England (some famous, others obscure) between the 1880s and the 1920s. The prose is elegant and measured, if occasionally fussy and monotonous. And Schwartz's academic enthusiasm and intellectual engagement with her subjects is evident on every page.

But After Sappho is a frustrating reading experience: it's neither literary novel nor literary scholarship. These miniaturist-scale chapters were too fragmentary to impart any kind of narrative momentum, beyond the passage of historical time. Schwartz is too bound by academic convention to venture even slightly beyond the outlines of the primary sources she copiously researched, and too reticent to project the emotional imagination and insight that would transform these academic subjects into literary characters: credible, individualized human beings. And there's very little character development, because the members of her pantheon of heroines are basically indistinguishable, aside from their chosen art forms, with cookie-cutter personality structures and basic drives.

Thanks to Liveright and Netgalley for giving me a free ARC in exchange for an honest, unbiased review.

"In these new lives, Virginia Woolf wrote, there would be that queer amalgamation of dream and reality we knew so intimately: it was the alchemy of our own existence."
I LOVE THIS BOOK SO MUCH WHO ALLOWED THIS TO EXIST I JUST WANT TO THANK YOU OH MY GOD. thank you netgalley for the arc this was amazing, truly felt like it was speaking to me? I love women, so much. Also? Changed my entire outlook on ibsen's a doll's house? i feel like I'm obliged to tell people to actually read this because it deserves so much.

I admire the unique style this book is written in, but it will be very hit or miss with readers. I personally enjoyed it at the start but as I kept reading it was slowly weighing town my enjoyment. I wish there was a timeline at the front of the book you could refer to, so you know better who's who, when and where. As characters change names, intersect and snippets jump backwards and forwards in time it can be hard to keep track of. You can easily forget each "character", but with how they are presented more academically that doesn't feel like an accurate noun. They will blend together, which might be some of the point, but regardless I like to have a handle of each character and that was slipping from my fingers.
There is nothing "bad" here, it was worth reading and learning lesbian sapphic history. But it could be a lot easier to read an article, listen to a podcast, find someone's essay online etc.