Greek Lyric Fragments in Margaret Goldsmith’s Sappho of Lesbos

Abstract

Sappho of Lesbos. A Psychological Reconstruction of Her Life (1938) by Margaret Leland Goldsmith (1894-1971) receives little attention in accounts of Sappho’s modern reception. This is despite the novel’s close engagement with Sappho’s corpus at a pivotal moment in the transmission of her text, when for the first time a substantial number of papyri containing her poetry had been published, edited, and translated. After contextualising and summarising the novel, this article examines Goldsmith’s relationship with the chief source of the many fragments of Greek lyric poetry which she cites (chiefly, but not exclusively, by Sappho): J.M. Edmonds’s Loeb edition. Goldsmith’s divergences from this source are analysed; so too is the impact on her novel of Edmonds’s liberal approach to the supplementation of fragmentary papyri. A codicil considers Goldsmith’s depiction of the lyric poet Stesichorus, a rare instance of the reception of that poet, which is compared to the use of his works, decades later, by Anne Carson; again, the publication and supplementation of papyri plays a crucial role.