Last year’s Divine Women by Bettany Hughes had a powerful effect on me and it certainly influenced Suzie and the Monsters. At the start of the second episode, Bettany Hughes visits the Sackler Library in Oxford to study a new fragment of Sappho’s poetry, and she exudes a reverent joy as she talks about the Lesbian poet (‘her sacred poetry opens up a sensuous, remarkable world’).
I have never really connected with Sappho’s poetry, perhaps because it’s so fragmentary, perhaps because it loses a lot in translation. Perhaps I simply haven’t discovered the key to its magic…
A Sapphic poet’s quick guide to Sapphic poetry – Leni King has written a guest post for Sh! Inspired to write Erotic Lesbian Poetry – a Quick Romp Through Time.
Another TV series last year that had a huge influence on me and Suzie and the Monsters was Lucy Worsley’s Harlots, Housewives and Heroines, which introduced me to the seventeenth century poet and dramatist (oh, and spy) Aphra Behn. She is believed to have been bisexual, and has been described as ‘the English Sappho’. Her poem ‘To the fair Clarinda, who made Love to me, imagin’d more than woman’ blends lesbian and transgender themes.
Francis James Franklin (Alina Meridon) 