#articles e

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‘As one of the first modern women poets to write openly about love between women, Vivien was naturally concerned about how posterity would treat her work, especially when she began seeing a definite bias against her work then. A 1908 anthology of French poetry, for example, contained none of Vivien’s poems and, according to Paul Lorenz, her works were also banned from the afternoon poetry readings presented by the actors of the Comédie française.’

— Tama Lea Engelking, ‘Renée Vivien’s Sapphic Legacy: Remembering the “House of the Muses”’, Atlantis: A Women’s Studies Journal

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‘Ironically, while [Renée Vivien’s] acute awareness of how male perspectives dominated and shaped Sappho’s place in literary tradition may have inspired her efforts to recuperate Sappho as a lesbian poet, it also fueled her fears for the future of her own work. She devoted an enormous amount of creative energy to clearing up the core of traditional misunderstandings about Sappho — namely, her sexual orientation — by generating and promoting her own “fiction” of a Sappho who wrote unambiguously for and about women.’

— Tama Lea Engelking, ‘Renée Vivien’s Sapphic Legacy: Remembering the “House of the Muses”’, Atlantis: A Women's Studies Journal