Selby Wynn Schwartz’s Booker-longlisted After Sappho tells a story of intersectional feminism

Through the fictional retelling of the stories of Virginia Woolf, Natalie Barney, Lina Poletti and Sibilla Aleramo, among others, the book aims to subvert accepted notions of gender and identity

There’s something about Selby Wynn Schwartz–both in her writing and herself. Her fluid style of prose is omnipresent–both in her Booker Prize-longlisted book, After Sappho (Picador India), and this story. “I am sadly neither a poet nor a seabird but I was trying to follow her [Anne Carson’s] style, and when I failed, it was at least an interesting failure,” Schwartz admits candidly, her sense of humour quite evident. I call it humour because I admire her self-deprecation, just as readers of After Sappho would agree that her unique writing style is anything but a failure. In fact, in the book, the award-winning writer tells a story that is so unique in the way it combines multiple perspectives of names from Virginia Woolf to Lina Poletti, without once losing the plot that weaves a greater story of intersectional (trans)feminism with its relevance rooted in the collective lived experiences of intergenerational creative voices. Schwartz talks about her style of writing, her process of creation and more in a chat with The Established:

Your writing style for the book is quite unique. How did you decide on the narrative style and why?

It partly came from my deep admiration for the poet and classicist Anne Carson, and my inability to do what she can do with language: Reading her work is like watching seabirds dive into the ocean and realising that they can essentially fly underwater as well as through air. I am sadly neither a poet nor a seabird but I was trying to follow her style, and when I failed, it was at least an interesting failure.

Another part comes from what research gives to me. There are hundreds of tiny gifts–from the discovery that Greek has a plural form for ‘dual’ nouns to the image of Oscar Wilde being stiffly ushered out of a hotel on the island of Capri as primly moral guests avert their eyes. Sometimes, given these glimmering details, a narrative almost weaves itself.

Since the story is interspersed with the stories of so many others, were you ever worried about your plot getting overwhelmed by the big names in the book? How did you weave them into your story?

The danger of writing about Virginia Woolf is that Virginia Woolf herself has already written so brilliantly on this topic; a writer has to take a deep breath before daring. Conversely, though, many of these more famous figures have left wonderful archives: Letters, journals, photographs, memoirs, sketches, drafts. In these cases it’s possible to go backstage, in a sense, to see what wasn’t in the spotlight of these characters’ public personae; that can create insights that are not so well-worn.

While the book makes a case for the importance of progress, it also ends in the 1920s. Why did you choose to end it there?

One reason is that Virginia Woolf’s Orlando—a prescient book in many ways—ends with its own publication in 1928. As a book that concludes with its own coming out into the world, then, Orlando has an everything-at-once-ness that gives its protagonist many pasts, and many possible futures.

Woolf contests the idea that a life must run a predictable course in the channels prescribed for it; rather, there are some people “we know to be dead, though they walk among us; some are not yet born, though they go through the forms of life; others are hundreds of years old though they call themselves 36.”

In After Sappho, the character Lina Poletti is born in 1885 and never dies—but in certain moments she voices some chants from the Italian transfeminist collective Non Una di Meno [Not One Less], which was created only in 2016. So perhaps a book that ends in the 1920s does not truly end in the 1920s? To me it is inspiring to imagine that those who fought for gender justice—for human rights, for their dreams of becoming, for the opportunity to write their own lives—are still present with us as we continue those struggles.

How did you approach characterisation for this book?

I spend a long time gathering elements from research before I can begin to imagine characters. I can’t explain why there are some historical details that I feel I must know (for example, how much the boys who worked in a glass factory in Porto Civitanova in the late 1800s were paid per day: one lira) and some aspects that are wholly imagined (like a character who hides the manifestos of her lover in the false bottoms of kitchen chairs). It’s as if some facts have a particular texture, and when enough of them are gathered together they make a kind of surface, like the nap of a carpet, a place to lie down and dream.

“Feminist novelist” is one of the tags that you have been given. Do you accept these tags or would you want to steer clear of labels?

I am proud to be called a feminist and do my best—my very fallible best, I admit—to live up to the ideals of intersectional transfeminism. Books like Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life, Judith Butler’s Undoing Gender, and Adrienne Maree Brown’s Emergent Strategy have been touchstones for me. But I didn’t think of myself as a novelist until the editors of Galley Beggar Press–Elly Millar and Sam Jordison–described my manuscript as a novel they might want to publish. All credit for After Sappho becoming a novel goes to them!

I am happy if this book is meaningful for some readers, for their own reasons, and they can call it whatever seems right to them—or perhaps even write their own stories, in their own forms and genres.

What’s the most interesting response you have received for the book that has stayed with you?

Can I write a short paean to booksellers? This summer I have been so moved to hear from booksellers and book distributors that they felt this book was worth recommending. Their tangible love of reading, their exuberant embrace of a broad range of literary forms, the fact that some of them asked me to sign their galleys: I have to end this paean by apologising to booksellers for getting slight teary-eyed in their bookshops.

What can we look forward to next from you?

A novella I wrote about the queer and fascinating life of Leopoldo Fregoli, a turn-of-the-century Italian quick-change artist, won the 2021 Reflex Press Novella Award and will be published in the United Kingdom in 2023. A sort of biography written in film strips, it’s called A Life in Chameleons.

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