In her autobiographical essay A Sketch of the Past, Virginia Woolf writes that she was born not on 25 January 1882, but “many thousands of years ago; and had from the very first to encounter instincts already acquired by thousands of ancestresses in the past”. These are instincts to protect the self and body against male intrusion; to take ecstatic pleasure in beauty; to seek truth in dreams.
In Selby Wynn Schwartz’s bold and original novel, Woolf is part of a chorus that forms the narrative voice, calling for a collective, transhistoric experience of female being. The book comprises biographical fragments of the lives of historical women, moving us mainly forwards through time from 1880s Italy, where the baby who will grow up to be Italian poet Lina Poletti first throws off her swaddling blanket, to 1920s Paris and London. We encounter Natalie Barney, Romaine Brooks, Sarah Bernhardt, Isadora Duncan, Nancy Cunard, Gertrude Stein and Radclyffe Hall. Poletti has a leading role and is Schwartz’s great discovery – shape-shifting, visionary, apparently seducing most of the great women of her age.
Schwartz’s most original move is to make her first-person narrator speak as “we”. She takes this from Woolf and from Sappho, who also wrote into the future (“someone will remember us / I say / even in another time”). She has Poletti urging her companions to form a chorus, “taking different aspects of the character in different centuries”. Schwartz’s “we” encompasses all the women who have transgressed by asking for freedom and by loving other women. It allows her to create an oracular collectivity out of these narratives.
The fragments are discrete but cumulative: plays are performed, love affairs begun and broken off, babies left behind. History brutally invades the characters’ lives, promising political progress only to frustratingly revoke it. Feminism is birthed as a movement and lesbianism is recognised and then condemned: “we still lived in a little hollow between laws”. The first world war arrives and Romaine Brooks and Ida Rubinstein drive ambulances to the French front and then, traumatised, paint each other instead: “Romaine began painting Ida, with her sunken eyes turned to the horizon, standing before the smoky ruins of Ypres with the cross marked red on her shoulder. What does she see in the distance? we asked Romaine. Ash upon ash, said Romaine, and no way back.”
Pulsing throughout is the question: do feminists in the present owe more to Sappho or to the Trojan prophetess-princess Cassandra, condemned to be unbelieved even as she foretold a terrible future with appalling accuracy? And whose voice should we heed? The collective narrator is seduced by Sappho, whom they read at school, “in classes intended merely to teach poetic metre”. Sappho is a poet of becoming, who urges young women to sit in trees (she recommended choosing the highest branches to avoid being trampled down by the feet of men). Here she becomes a blazing emblem of beauty, and of poetry that survives, even in fragments.
But in heeding Sappho, the narrator worries they forget Cassandra: the voice of destruction and danger, and of a future that sweeps upon us unprepared. By setting the two against each other, Schwartz asks what kind of strength we can discover in an act of collective storytelling, and finds that the voices of doom cannot be forgotten. “We wanted stories set about us like gleaming surfaces, reflecting and burnishing our hopes. Was it not at last our time to become?”
The drama of becoming; reading books in trees; falling with Virginia Woolf for Vita Sackville-West, with Natalie Barney for Romaine Brooks. There is something old fashioned about this book, for all its avant gardism. Indeed, perhaps the avant garde at this point is old fashioned. The book is written with an urgent sense of needing to speak right up to the present, yet its stories end in 1928. There is a danger of fetishisation here. Are 1920s Paris and Sussex still our best hope of liberation, and are we doomed if they are? Schwartz, for me, doesn’t quite face this question.
But if I’ve quoted a lot from the novel in this review, it’s because the prose is so compelling. After Sappho is a book that’s wholly seduced by seduction and that seduces in turn. And that’s partly because the sentences, crisply flat yet billowing easily into gorgeous lyricism, feel so easily, casually of our time. The confidence in Schwartz’s ventriloquising of the past sends the reader spinning into the present, even if she herself doesn’t look it squarely in the eye.
A lot of feminist novelists are looking backwards right now: think of Lauren Groff’s Matrix, set in a 12th-century convent. It’s as if, as women lose their freedoms and their voice in the present, and we face the growing knowledge that things may never truly change, we need to pause to take stock and learn what we can from our ancestors; understanding, as Woolf did, which of our instincts were theirs. In the Sappho-Cassandra dialectic Schwartz brings something new and necessary to the dance across time, and it’s a dialectic in which our embodied lives are central. At once breathlessly, carnally beautiful and doomed to assault by medical neglect and male power, the female body emerges here prepared to fight for itself in endlessly flexible, sensual forms of collectivity.
• After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz is published by Galley Beggar (£9.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
