Selby Wynn Schwartz

What did we want? To begin with, we wanted what half the population had got by just being born. It’s 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.

En el jardín de Natalie Barney, en el París del cambio de siglo, un grupo de escritoras, artistas y activistas se dan cita para interpretar los versos de Safo. Las llaman amazonas, viragos, tríbadas e invertidas, y son algunas de las mujeres más fascinantes del siglo Colette, Renée Vivien, Isadora Duncan, Romaine Brooks, Gertrude Stein, Radclyffe Hall, Eva Palmer o Lina Poletti. En Después de Safo, como en el Orlando de Virginia Woolf, la realidad y la ficción se fusionan para trazar un puente que conecta las búsquedas, las resistencias y las reinvenciones de aquellas que, desde el siglo VII a. C. hasta hoy, han sido tocadas por el deseo de vivir y crear libremente. Una historia hecha de fragmentos de muchas historias, hilvanada por la prosa lírica de Selby Wynn Schwartz con la traducción de Aurora Luque (Premio Nacional de Poesía).